


Sea and Sky

by Alizon, Kahani



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dieselpunk, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 21:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 68,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alizon/pseuds/Alizon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahani/pseuds/Kahani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alfred Jones, air transport pilot, takes a commission he should have turned down. Arthur Kirkland, airship captain, acquires a magical artifact he wishes he’d never encountered. Also, there are dirigibles. Dirigibles and zombies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an all-human AU in an imaginary Dieselpunk setting. Human names (canon and fanon) are used for all the nations, and China and Hong Kong have been genderswapped to their Nyotalia versions. Most country names are taken from either historical or mythical/semi-mythical place names, with the exception of Thembria, which is taken from the cartoon TailSpin. The flying aircraft carrier "Iron Cross" is partially named after Don Karnage's Iron Vulture from the same cartoon.

Francis's was crowded today. A wave of noise hit Alfred as soon as he opened the door. Loud voices blended into an indistinguishable mass of sound, with jazz music just audible somewhere in the background; Francis's battered phonograph, probably. A live band would have been louder.  
  
Stepping inside was a relief, despite the noise. They were out of the rain at last, and the air temperature was at least fifteen degrees cooler inside, and it even felt less humid. Francis had bribed, blackmailed, or seduced one of the magic workers among his clientele into setting up weather wards, and the break from the tropical heat outside was worth whatever price he'd paid for it.  
  
It also kept the cream and gold wallpaper from peeling off the walls, the way it usually did around here. The constant humidity of the Southern Archipelago rotted fabric, warped wood, and made wallpaper paste come unglued. It made maintenance on the Eagle a bitch.  
  
"Hey, Bonnefoy, the mail's here," Alfred called out, holding up the half-full mailbag he'd hauled all the way across the archipelago. He and Matthew always put Antillia at the end of their route, because more mail was directed toward the tiny outlying island than anywhere else except Ninguaria, the main island. Half the airship crew in the archipelago had their letters sent to them care of Francis Bonnefoy, and not just because his place always had good Armorican wine and Albian whisky behind the bar.  
  
Alfred was always careful never to look too closely at any of the letters or packages Francis handled; ignorance probably wouldn't help him or his brother that much if they were ever hauled up in front of the Ninguarian governor or a mainland court for aiding and abetting smugglers or pirates, but it couldn't hurt.  
  
Lovino glared at him sullenly from behind the bar, and made no move to come take possession of the mail pouch. Alfred hefted it, considering for a moment the likelihood of it causing any damage Francis would make him pay for if he threw it at his bartender's head.  
  
Matthew snagged the bag out of his hand just as he decided that he'd probably end up taking out several whisky bottles when Lovino failed to catch it.  
  
"He's probably in the kitchen," Matthew said. "I'll just take it back to him."  
  
He wove his way through the tables toward the open door to the restaurant's kitchen, and Alfred turned away and started surveying the packed room, looking for an empty table. It wasn't normally this crowded in the middle of the afternoon; everyone must have seen the low barometer levels and the look of the sky and stayed in port.  
  
They could always eat at the bar if they had too, but after two days spent island hopping, Alfred wanted to sit down somewhere where he'd have elbow room and space to stretch his legs out. The Eagle's cockpit was large enough for both a pilot and a copilot, and you could store a couple hundred pounds of cargo in the back where the passenger seats used to be, but it like most airplanes, it hadn't been designed with a six-foot tall pilot in mind.  
  
The tables near the bar were all packed, mostly with local fishermen, though he could see Vainamoinen and Oxenstierna at one of them. The rest of their airship crew were probably here somewhere, too, unless their pilot had gotten himself thrown out again. Vainamoinen's crew were all Nordmen, fair-skinned blonds from Hreidgotaland and Kvenland, and their ship's escort pilot was the sort of wild-haired viking warrior peasants in Albion had once prayed to be spared from.  
  
There were a pair of free tables by the back wall, but he hated sitting there; it was the darkest corner of the restaurant, and also the farthest away from the kitchen.  
  
Maybe Francis would have those little fruit tarts tonight, or those custard things with the crunchy melted sugar on top. He'd had nothing in the plane but sandwiches, and it was already nearly three o' clock, well past lunchtime and getting close to dinner time.  
  
"I see you finally made it in." The detestably familiar voice came from right behind him.  
  
Alfred spun around, nearly tripping over his own feet. "Arthur," he blurted out, wincing inwardly as his voice almost cracked. "I didn't know you were in port." If he had, he would have gone somewhere else to eat and brought the mail by afterwards. He preferred to deliver his cargo first thing – Eagle Transport had a reputation to uphold – but he also preferred to avoid Arthur Kirkland whenever possible.  
  
Now, of course, if he and Matthew went somewhere else, it would look like he was running away.  
  
Arthur glowered up at him. He was wearing what Alfred thought of as his 'pirate captain's' coat, the long, green greatcoat with big, shiny buttons and gold trim that stayed pristine no matter how much sun and salt-water it was exposed to. Most magic-workers didn't waste power on such petty things, but Arthur had power to burn, and had always been fussy about his clothing.  
  
His nose and cheekbones were sunburned, as usual, and splotched with freckles; if he wanted to waste magic, he should have spent some on keeping the sun off his skin rather than on his stupid coat.  
  
"Bonnefoy's been whining about his packages all day. He didn't think you'd want to risk your precious seaplane in this weather." From the arched eyebrow and amused quirk of his mouth, Arthur clearly hadn't expected him to make it in either.  
  
"My plane can take whatever the sea can throw at it," Alfred returned. "It's you airship guys who have to worry about a little wind."  
  
"Anyone with brains or experience worries about storms at this time of year. I should have told Bonnefoy to stop whinging; either you'd show up, or his precious letters would be lost at sea."  
  
"I hope you're really as good at weather wards as you say you are. I'd hate for the rest of your crew to lose their airship tonight."  
  
Arthur's face flushed, and he took a step forward, eyes narrowing. Whatever he had been going to say – and it would have been something cutting, Alfred was sure – was forestalled by Matthew's sudden appearance.  
  
"There you are," his brother said brightly. "Francis has a table for us. It's right over…"  
  
Alfred followed the line of his pointing finger and saw Antonio, Francis's combination waiter, sous-chef, and bouncer, clearing off a table near the door. Right next to the table where Arthur's bratty little cabin boy was currently throwing a dinner roll at the group of overly-buttoned up Thembrians at the next table over.  
  
Francis had a cruel sense of humor. And he liked Arthur even less than Alfred did, which was saying something.  
  
"We're sitting there." Alfred jabbed a finger at the empty tables by the back wall, as far away from Arthur's crew as it was possible to be without sitting outside. He turned his back on Arthur and made straight for them.  
  
"Sorry," he heard Matthew saying behind him. "It's been a long day. You know he gets when he's hungry."  
  
Matthew, the gods only knew why, actually liked the smug pirate bastard. Or at least, he pretended to. It was hard to tell with him sometimes.  
  
Airship pirates like Arthur Kirkland were one of the reasons no one took the Southern Archipelago's fledging government seriously. It had taken years of effort to get the islands to agree to follow any sort of unified governing body, and even now, they were more of a loosely knit confederation than anything else, nominally presided over by the governor of Ninguaria, the largest island. And as far as the outside world was concerned, the archipelago was nothing but a nest of pirates given more importance and influence than it deserved by the presence of the smoking sea's gas deposits.  
  
The smuggling ring he was sure Francis was running was one thing – half the archipelago's commerce came from Thembrians and Thuringians circumventing their countries' trade embargoes by using local merchants as go betweens, and it did no harm to anyone involved. Attacking Albian or mainland airships, on the other hand, was going to bring somebody's air corps down on their heads someday.  
  
Once Alfred was sitting down in a comfortable chair with a cold drink in his hand and a hot meal on the way, it was hard to stay irritated about anything. The fish stew was amazing, despite Francis's disconcerting habit of leaving entire octopus tentacles intact in it for the sake of drama. (Food, Alfred felt, did not need drama). The week's mail run was behind them, the Eagle was safely tied up at the marina, and his worry that they'd fail to beat the storm here and would have to land on a choppy sea with rain ruining visibility had been groundless.  
  
"We'll be lucky to find a hotel for the night," Matthew said, after a long period of silence during which they wolfed down their food.  
  
Alfred nodded, still trying to scrape up the last traces of broth from his bowl. In fair weather, airship crew tended to sleep aboard their ships – some of them rarely left their craft even in port, going weeks at a time without setting foot on solid ground. Storms like the one blowing up tonight, on the other hand, were a different story. The major weakness of airships, other than the risk of explosions if anything ignited the hydrogen gas most of them were filled with, was their tendency to break apart in high winds. Most airship wrecks not caused by piracy were due to the crafts' rigid frames buckling and the skin of their gas bags splitting during storms.  
  
Once, shortly after he and Matthew had come to the archipelago, one of the airships tethered off Ninguaria's main harbor had been struck by lightning. The explosion had lit up the entire sky, a giant red and orange ball of flame bigger and brighter than anything he'd ever seen. No one had known whether the craft's anti-combustion wards had failed in the face of the lightning strike, or whether it had simply never had them to begin with.  
  
"We'll pay double," he said. For a soft, clean bed that didn't move, it would be worth it. And coming in fresh off a mail run, they had the money for it.  
  
"I thought we were saving up to pay for an engine overhaul."  
  
"It won't cost that much," Alfred told him. "And you taking a shower will be worth it."  
  
Matthew tried to stab him in the hand with his fork.  
  
Alfred jerked his hand back, nearly knocking over his water glass in the process, and reached over to smack Matthew across the knuckles with the back of his spoon.  
  
There was the sound of a throat clearing behind him.  
  
Alfred turned in his chair, already preparing an excuse or apology for Antonio about how they weren't really fighting, and anyway, Kirkland's cabin boy had been throwing things at people.  
  
It wasn't Francis's bouncer.  
  
Two of the Thembrians from the table near the door were standing a few feet away, their high-collared wool coats unbuttoned in the heat. The older of the two took a step forward and held out his hand. "Kazimir Sergeyevich," he said, as Alfred automatically stood and took it. "I hear that you two have just completed a delivery. Would you be interested in taking on another commission?"  
  
"Now?" Alfred stared at the man for a moment, before logic caught up with him and he realized that he couldn't possibly mean right now. Kazimir Sergeyevich wore wire-rimmed glasses similar to Alfred's own, and had a receding hairline that he'd tried to compensate for by slicking his hair across his head with hair oil. He was pasty pale, obviously a newcomer to the islands.  
  
His companion, younger, taller, and dressed in a grey shirt that fastened at the side and tall boots, looked more at home here, despite his more traditional clothing. He was tanned, with sunbleached hair that said that he'd spent long hours outdoors in the heat.  
  
You'd think he'd have learned by now to ditch the heavy coat.  
  
"You must leave immediately," the younger man said. "We cannot wait until storm is over. Our delivery is too important."  
  
"You're going to have to wait." Alfred smiled at him cheerfully to soften the refusal. He hated to turn down a job, but from the looks of the sky outside, not to mention the marina's barometer, there was no other choice. "It'll probably blow over quickly."  
  
Kazimir Sergeyevich shook his head, smiling tightly. "It must be done tonight – the package must be at the Thembrian consulate on Ninguaria by dawn. A great deal depends on it, and it is already late."  
  
"Good luck finding someone crazy enough to take it there tonight." Matthew was still seated, eyeing the two Thembrians speculatively. "You don't know much about planes, do you mister?"  
  
"We would hire boat, but no one here will sail beyond sight of land." The younger Thembrian snorted. "Superstitious fools."  
  
"You obviously haven't seen the sea life around here yet," Matthew said dryly. "There are octopus out in the deep water with tentacles the size of you." And they were aggressive sons of bitches, too. They liked to attack fishing boats, usually at the end of the day when the fishermen had the largest catch, and the teeth around the edges of their suckers left circular gouges nearly an inch in diameter in the wood.  
  
No one in the archipelago would take a boat into deep water. It was the main reason why Eagle Transport did so well; there was little in the way of competition.  
  
"We are willing to pay extra to compensate you for the risk." Sergeyevich smiled. "A great deal extra."  
  
How much – no, taking off again tonight would be just plain stupid. "Nobody's going to take you up on that offer, Mr. Sergeyevich," Alfred advised him. "Not on a night like tonight."  
  
Sergeyevich raised his eyebrows, looking both disappointed and faintly surprised. "We had heard that you were the one pilot who might be willing." He shrugged slightly, his expression turning resigned. "Well, I suppose it's to be expected. The weather does look very bad, and Captain Kirkland was most insistent that you wouldn't be willing to take on the job. "  
  
"Someone was having a joke at our expense," Matthew said. "Or telling you tall tales. My brother's a good pilot, and the Eagle's a solid old kite, but-"  
  
"How much extra are you talking about?" Alfred asked.  
  


***

  
  
Even from a good distance away, the Iron Cross looked very big. And very high up. The airplane Feliciano could see taxiing to a stop at the end of the carrier's runway, on the other hand, looked small and rickety and not at all like something he was certain he wanted to go flying in.  
  
When he'd first been told that he was being transferred from the surface navy to one of the Thuringrike's airships, Feliciano had been excited. A little confused, since being airship crew was more prestigious than being a sailor, and his three months of service on the _Thetis_ had not gone well, but pleased. He couldn't be as much of an unqualified disaster as Werner had said if they were sending him to an airship.  
  
They had originally assigned him to work as part of the ship's maintenance crew, but then he'd forgotten to do a couple of things – not very many! - and lost several tools, and they'd pulled him off maintenance duty and had him on cleaning duty, which he'd been much better at that except for that one time when he'd left a pool of water behind while mopping a hallway and one of the officers had slipped and sprain his ankle. But that had only happened once, and he'd worked really hard, and now it had paid off.  
  
Leutnant Werner was apparently the one who'd put his name up for the transfer, which meant he must have forgiven him for the ankle!  
  
Feliciano watched the airplane's propeller shudder to a halt, and reminded himself that he was really very lucky to get this opportunity, and that he ought to still be excited. Airships almost never exploded these days, except during battle.  
  
He'd heard that the northern theater saw a lot of action. And the Iron Cross, stationed in the Nordic Straights and over the North Sea, would be right in the thick of it.  
  
He'd hoped to finish out the two years of his conscription and go home without ever having to see a battle, much less be in one. That hope had seemed perfectly possible on the _Thetis_. The _Thetis_ was stationed safely in the Ionian and Central Seas, where no one had fought a naval battle of any size since Ionia and Armorica had been absorbed into the Thuringrike. Thuringia and its subordinate kingdoms weren't currently at war with Ophir and no ship smaller than a full-blown battleship was ever sent into the southern archipelago, pirates or not, so all Feliciano had had to worry about were storms, emergency drills, and the blisters he got doing punishment duty after he made mistakes in the emergency drills.  
  
Now, he'd be right on the front lines, facing Thembrian airships and warplanes, and-- He cut that train of thought off. He would just have to do his best. It had been good enough on the _Thetis_ , or they wouldn't have sent him here, so it would be good enough on the Iron Cross.  
  
And he got to ride an airplane up to the airship, because they couldn't land just to pick up one person. He was excited! Really! It wasn't scary at all.  
  
His pilot was climbing out of the airplane now, bundled up head to toe so thoroughly that no skin was visible – along with his leather jacket and helmet, he wore flying goggles and a white scarf pulled up over his face so that even that was hidden.  
  
He'd heard that it was cold at high altitudes; it must be true.  
  
Feliciano drew himself up to his full height and saluted; Thuringrike Flying Corp pilots were always officers. "Seaman Vargas, reporting for duty, sir."  
  
The pilot stopped a few feet away from him and saluted back, a much crisper salute than Feliciano's. "Hauptmann Beilschmidt. Welcome to-" he broke off, leaning forward a little and cocking his head to one side. The dark-tinted goggles covered his eyes, but Feliciano could almost feel the man staring at him.  
  
Was his uniform jacket too crumpled? Had one of his buttons come undone? Had he _lost_ a button? He glanced down to check – no, everything looked all right – and then the pilot started to cackle with laughter, the sound vaguely familiar even muffled by his scarf.  
  
"God's missing eye, Felicia! Felix. Whatever your name is. Roderich's little cousin!" He reached up to pull down his scarf and yanked off his leather flying helmet, revealing tousled white hair and a wicked-looking scar stretching the entire length of his right cheek. "What are you doing here?"  
  
Feliciano blinked at him, trying to remember which of his cousin Roderich's friends had had a face full of dueling scars, and then it clicked. White hair. Cackling laugh. Ludwig's older brother, the one who'd always been dragging his best friend off away from him to go hunting or fishing or do something else Feliciano had been "too young" to do. He'd gotten into a fistfight with Roderich and broken his glasses, and then Roderich's fiancée had given him a black eye.  
  
He hadn't had the scar then, of course; he'd been fourteen, and Felicano had been seven, about to turn eight. Ludwig had been nearly ten, just enough older than Feliciano to seem experienced and worldly, but still young enough to be willing to play with him.  
  
"Gilbert!" Feliciano grinned, and resisted the urge to hug the other man. He was still an officer, and you didn't hug officers. "I haven't seen you in years! This is great. I thought I'd be all alone up here and not know anybody and now you're here."  
  
"You remembered me." Gilbert smirked, reaching up to pull his goggles off. "Of course you did. No one ever forgets me."  
  
His eyes were blood red. Feliciano nearly jumped back in surprise, and might have actually gasped or squeaked. He wasn't sure, though. Red. Not from broken blood-vessels, like normal eyes after a long night up drinking or from a bad eye infection – Gilbert's irises were as red as Feliciano's were brown.  
  
He definitely hadn't had those when they were kids. He'd had sort of colorless pale blue eyes, and squinted a lot, like someone who really needed glasses but never wore them.  
  
"Aren't they great?" Gilbert closed his eyes and tapped an eyelid with one finger. Spidery pink scars covered each eyelid. It looked painful, almost worse than the red eyes themselves. "They won't let you be a pilot unless you have perfect vision, so I got one of the sorcerer's corps guys to put a weirding on them for me. I can see perfectly, and they turned this awesome color. One of the aircrew makes a sign against the evil eye every time he sees me. It's hilarious."  
  
"That's… good," he said. If Gilbert was happy about his creepy eyes, then Feliciano supposed maybe they didn't look _that_ bad.  
  
"So what did you do to get set up here?"  
  
"Do?"  
  
Gilbert nodded. "Nobody's sent to the far north station unless they fucked up somehow," he said. "What did you do?"  
  
"I… nothing!" Feliciano protested. "I thought I'd been doing well. Except for the spilled water and Leutnant Werner's ankle, but that was an accident!"  
  
Gilbert snickered. "Yeah, that sounds familiar."  
  
"Well, what did you do?" That sounded a little too belligerent, so he tried to soften it. "You look like a good pilot – you landed without crashing and everything."  
  
A shrug. "You get in one duel too many, and suddenly nobody cares how many airships you've shot down. They decided they had to 'make an example' of me. Plus, Beilschmidt is not a popular name."  
  
"So they sent me here as a punishment?" Not a reward or a sign of approval after all. And he'd been trying so hard.  
  
"Well, we did lose a couple of guys recently. They might have just thought we needed more manpower."  
  
"Oh. I'm sure that was it." Lose a couple of guys? Gilbert said it so casually that it sounded almost as if they had just wandered off somewhere and gotten misplaced. "Is there a lot of fighting? I'm not very good with guns."  
  
"We don't use guns. Not on airships." Gilbert eyed him for a moment, then asked, "Do you smoke?"  
  
"Yes?" Not as much as Lovino had.  
  
Gilbert grinned at him. "Not anymore. Cigarettes are banned onboard airships. Too much risk of starting a fire. Do you want me to delay long enough for you to have one last smoke? I could find some kind of mechanical problem."  
  
"No, that's okay. I don't want to be late." He was going to make a good impression this time, not like the _Thetis_. Maybe they hadn't wanted him in the surface navy, and maybe he'd been a bad sailor, but that didn't mean he couldn't be a good airship crewman. It wasn't really a punishment at all, he decided.  
  
It was going to be his second chance.  
  
There couldn't be too much fighting if airship crews didn't even carry guns. The men the Iron Cross had lost could have gotten sick, or deserted.  
  
Gilbert was eying him again, more closely this time. "How much do you weigh?"  
  
Feliciano shrugged. "I don't know. My bag isn't very heavy, though." He waved at the small canvass bag by his feet, which was all the navy had let him bring.  
  
"You're built like a little girl, so you have to weigh less than me." He nodded toward the airplane, still crouched menacingly a few yards away. A set of metal bars topped with a large hook protruded from the top of the upper wing, ugly and ungainly. Just behind the wings was an open hole in the body of the pane, with absolutely nothing to stop someone inside from falling out. "You get to sit up front."  
  
"Don't touch the stick," he said a few minutes later, once Feliciano had climbed over the plane's lower wing and up into the open cockpit. "And keep your feet off the rudder pedals. And don't touch the throttle – that's that knob there – or the radio, or the-- look, just don't touch anything."  
  
Feliciano nodded – not that Gilbert could see him, since he was sitting in plane's back seat, directly behind him – and planted both feet firmly on the floor, hands gripping his knees. He had to keep them spread wide to keep from accidentally brushing against the control stick, but not so wide that the outside of his knee would knock into the throttle-knob. The cockpit was tiny, barely big enough for the two seats it held. It was a little deeper than it had looked at first, though, and Feliciano took comfort in the fact that the edges of the cockpit came all the way up to his shoulders; that would make it harder for him to fall out.  
  
There was a harness to hold him in place, but it didn't seem like that much security when they were going to be so high up, with nothing but open air under them.  
  
"Put these on. Sometimes oil blows back from the engine."  
  
A leather helmet and pair of goggles were dangled over his right shoulder, and he had to let go of his knee to reach up for them. He expected them to be dark-tinted, like Gilbert's, but they were clear, and not as uncomfortable as they looked. In spite of himself, Feliciano felt a little thrill of excitement as he adjusted them over the bridge of his nose, and he wished for a moment that the panel full of gauges in front of him had something reflective on it, so he could see what he looked like dressed like a dashing pilot.  
  
Then one of the carrier's deck crew came forward to start the propeller, and a roar of noise obliterated anything else Gilbert might have said.  
  
They were moving forward now, and Feliciano tried to sit very still and _not touch anything_. He couldn't see where they were going, only the wing overhead and the nose of the plane in front of him – how far was the edge of the deck? They hadn't lifted off yet, they were going to run right off the end and crash into the water, and—  
  
With a violent jolt, the plane slammed forward, the deck dropped out from under them, and just as he was certain they were both going to die, they were going up, the ship shrinking under them and the waves getting smaller and smaller until they turned into tiny wrinkles.  
  
It was… kind of fun. And pretty. Incredibly pretty.  
  
Feliciano sat up straighter, trying to lean over far enough to get a good look at the ocean below them. He could actually see the Thuringian coastline in the distance, a grey-green blur – or was that Hreidgotaland?  
  
He ought to draw this. He hadn't been able to bring any of his paints, but there were always pencils, and this kind of view deserved to be immortalized. He stared intently at the distant coastline, the toy-sized boat, the tiny crinkle-waves, trying to memorize it all so that he could draw it later.  
  
Wait, no. He was going to be on an airship. He'd be able to see everything from this high up _all the time_.  
  
It was even louder now, wind howling around them; he tried to shout to Gilbert, to ask why they were flying away from the Iron Cross instead of towards it, and then the entire plane tilted over to the side and they began turning around.  
  
It was huge. Easily as big as the ship they'd just left, its massive grey sides painted with the red eagle symbol of the Thuringrike. He'd expected it to be rounder, like a balloon, but it was more of a long cigar-shape, its metal ribs pressing visibly against its fabric skin. Like the wings of Gilbert's airplane, only really, really big.  
  
Underneath the giant gas bag, the gondola that held the crew looked tiny, too small to hold the fifty to seventy men airship crews could contain.  
  
"Where are we going to land?" he shouted. "Is there a runway on top?"  
  
Gilbert didn't answer; he probably couldn't even hear him. He might not have said anything even if he had. He could be a little mean sometimes, Feliciano remembered. That had been a long time ago, though. Now that they were adults, he'd probably outgrown it.  
  
Maybe they weren't going to land. Maybe he was going to have to climb out of the plane and up some kind of rope ladder.  
  
If that were the case, he would be brave, and climb the rope ladder like a soldier. They were over water, not land. If he fell, he might still be okay.  
  
They were under the airship now, so close that he couldn't see the curved sides anymore, just the huge underside overhead, blocking out the sunlight. There was a cross-shaped hole opening up in its base, behind the gondola.  
  
Where they going to fly up inside the airship? That seemed… dangerous.  
  
The underside of the airship was only a dozen or so yards above them now, and crewmen were visible inside the opening, lowering some kind of metal framework. It looked sort of like a giant, metal trapeze, and Feliciano looked from it to the big, metal hook mounted on top of the airplane's upper wing, and then closed his eyes.  
  
He gripped his knees so hard that it hurt, and tried to concentrate on remembering to breathe.  
  
Could Gilbert even see the bar from behind him? Why wasn't he sitting up front?  
  
The plane jolted, and Feliciano opened his eyes in spite of his determination not to. If they were about to die, he needed to see.  
  
The engine cut off, and for a moment, the airplane just hung there terrifyingly. Then the entire metal framework they were hanging from started to rise again, lifting them up into the airship.  
  
Huge metal ribs curved up around them, almost disappearing into the darkness overhead. Giant metal girders braced them together at intervals, criss-crossing the middle of the ship like the spokes of a wheel. Dozens of wheels, marching off into the distance.  
  
The plane stopped rising with a shuddery little jerk and rotated to the side, coming to a stop next to another plane. There were four of them in here, he saw, counting the one he was sitting in. No, five. There was another one off to the right, a double-headed raven painted on its nose indicating that it belonged to the leader of a hunting squadron.  
  
Five planes, and they filled less than a quarter of the cavernous space.  
  
Something jabbed him in the back of the head. "You can get out now, Airman Vargas."  
  
"It's so big," he said. "I didn't think it would be so… where is the gas?" They were still breathing air, not suffocating on hydrogen.  
  
"The gas cells are in the walls."  
  
Gilbert was shouting, Feliciano realized – they both were, the roar of the plane's engine still ringing in his ears. He could still hear engine noise from somewhere, but it was muffled and far away.  
  
How did this harness come undone? There were so many buckles, all connecting together at his waist, and no matter how hard he tugged, it wouldn't come loose.  
  
Gilbert leaned over his shoulder, squashing Feliciano into the seat, and pressed down on part of the central buckle. The entire thing came apart.  
  
"Oh," Feliciano said. "So that's how you do it."  
  
"You're late, Hauptmann." The deep, commanding voice came from outside the plane.  
  
Gilbert climbed off him and swung down from the plane and onto a metal catwalk in one smooth movement that Feliciano wasn't sure he was going to be able to copy. He saluted, back perfectly straight and heels clicking together, and a completely unmilitary grin on his face. "Guess who I found down below?"  
  
"You could at least try to address me as Korvettenkapitän, Hauptmann Beilschmidt," the other man said dryly. "Or sir."  
  
Feliciano swallowed hard, forcing down his nervousness. This was his new captain. He was going to be calm. Soldierly. Make a good impression. Getting out of the plane couldn't be that hard; Gilbert had made it look easy. He'd climb out, and then he'd salute and introduce himself as properly as he could, and the korvettenkapitän would be pleased with him.  
  
"What are you going to do, Lutz," Gilbert drawled, "take away my hunting squadron and send me to the North Sea?"  
  
"I'll think of something."  
  
He didn't sound angry, despite how disrespectful Gilbert was being. Feliciano hoped that was a sign of a forgiving nature, not like the kind of man who'd hold grudges about spilled water and sprained ankles. He hoisted himself out of the airplane's cockpit, careful not to look down, and let himself dangle over the side for a moment before he let go and dropped down to the catwalk below. There. Nice and graceful, and he hadn't put his foot through the lower wing.  
  
He turned around, took a step forward, and the strap of his bag caught on one of the plane's wing wires.  
  
Feliciano went sprawling, flying forward and landing face down on the catwalk, with his nose inches from his new commanding officer's boots. His very shiny boots.  
  
Ow. Ow, ow, ow, he'd bitten his tongue. And his knees and elbows were numb.  
  
He pushed himself up to his knees and saluted, smiling hopefully up at the man. "Airman Vargas, reporting for duty, sir."  
  
Ludwig Beilschmidt stared down at him, toweringly tall and broad-shouldered, his face blank with surprise. "Felicia?" he blurted out.  
  
  
  


***

  
  
  
The wind was slackening off; they were starting to actually make headway now, instead of the snail's-pace crawl they'd been moving at before. It had stopped raining nearly an hour ago, but the wind was the real problem. That, and the fuel they were beginning to run low on.  
  
"This was a terrible idea. You've had stupid ideas before, but this one's the stupidest you've ever had in our entire lives."  
  
"You're not helping," Alfred muttered. His arms ached from fighting to keep the Eagle steady amidst a non-stop headwind and the cross-winds from Hel, their fuel tanks were only a quarter full, and he wasn't entirely certain where they were.  
  
That was supposed to be Matthew's job, but he was more interested in complaining than in making any attempt at computing their airspeed, time travelled, and the number of degrees off course the crosswinds had blown them. By day, navigation in the archipelago was easy, with at least one island always visible somewhere on the horizon. But dark had fallen only an hour into their flight, and at night, in the pitch-blackness of a storm with the eerie light of phosphorescence visible from the waves below, all they had was a compass, an altimeter and airspeed indicator, and dead reckoning.  
  
"Was it just me, or did the foreigners willing to pay a small fortune to get their unidentified cargo transported through the middle of a tropical storm seem suspicious. It was probably just me. Sorry. Ignore me. You usually do."  
  
Matthew was in full-blown passive aggressive bitch mode. It was making Alfred's head hurt, or maybe that was the hour. He should have gotten some sleep before taking off. Or insisted on waiting until the storm had blown itself out. It had only lasted a few hours, not as long as he'd feared, and if they'd just been leaving now…  
  
But their client had mentioned Arthur's doubts, and that kind of slur on Alfred's guts and flying skills was impossible to take lying down. Even if he maybe should have let it pass.  
  
His reputation was on the line, he reminded himself. Once the waves died down, they could land just long enough to refuel from one of the gasoline canisters Matthew kept in the back. The sun wouldn't be up for several hours, which left them plenty of time to re-orient themselves and still make it to the main island by breakfast time. A little bit late, yeah, but still quicker than any other transport pilots in the archipelago could have done it.  
  
"It's probably got something to do with the war," he said, squinting at the luminescent paint of the airspeed indicator. Nearly eighty knots now. Ha, take that, headwind. Alfred Jones and the mighty Sea Eagle have defeated you!  
  
"Which is why we should have stayed out of it."  
  
"For that kind of money? A hero never backs down from a challenge, Matty."  
  
Matthew muttered something under his breath – all Alfred caught was the word "moron."  
  
"Who cares if the Thembrians want to ship guns or bombs or something north to blow up some blood eagles? Let them kill the warmongering bastards."  
  
"Like Imperial Thembria's any better?"  
  
"They're the ones paying us, and they're farther away from the islands."  
  
Matthew didn't have a comeback to that one.  
  
The main island was just visible on the horizon now – at least, that's what Alfred was pretty sure that dark smudge was. He reminded himself to point out to Matthew later that upgrading from their original little three-seater seaplane to the Eagle had proven more than worth it tonight. The twin-engine flying boat had cost over five times what Eagle Transport's original little mail plane had, and they were still paying off the last of the purchase price, but it had three times the range, could carry over four thousand pounds of cargo, not counting fuel weight, and its huge, fourteen cylinder radial engines were some of the most advanced in the world. And its metal-clad fuselage and wings had held together through the storm winds, which would have ripped the wood-and-fabric seaplane apart.  
  
It took longer to get into the air, but the entire point of a seaplane was that you had all the runway you could ever want.  
  
"Do we have any radio reception yet?" He asked. "We should tell the Ninguaria marina we're coming." He was sure it was Ninguaria up ahead. He must have done an even better job compensating for their sideslip than he'd thought.  
  
"I think that's New Servage," Matthew named the island several miles east of Ninguaria.  
  
"A dollar says it's Ninguaria." Alfred looked down at the fuel gauges again – the left tank was lower than the right, and he was about to complain to Matthew that he wasn't balancing them properly when the clouds ahead finally parted to reveal a nearly full moon, and his brother said,  
  
"Watch it; there's an airship at ten o' clock."  
  
An airship? In this weather? They were either suicidal or… he couldn't think of any other alternatives.  
  
The airship's bulk loomed up out of the darkness, ahead and to the left of them. It was small, as airships went - the big warships of Imperial Thembria and the Thuringrike were the size of a naval battleship - but it still dwarfed their plane. And it was close, close enough to be in danger of blocking their flight path.  
  
Good thing Matthew had sharp eyes. He wore the same glasses Alfred did, but spotting other aircraft wasn't just about how far you could see; Alfred had known men with twenty-twenty vision who seemed utterly oblivious to what else occupied their airspace.  
  
Speaking of which… Light flashing off something in motion in the sky above them caught his eye, and he looked up to see another plane, one of the small biplanes that some airships carried for reconnaissance and as defense against pirates.  
  
The radio emitted a crackle of static, and then a vaguely familiar voice came through.  
  
"Sea Eagle. This is the Nordic Confederation airship _King Gustav_. We know you're carrying Thembrian military cargo. We request that you land and prepare to hand it over, or you will be shot down."  
  
No wonder the Thembrians had wanted their cargo transported immediately – it must be either highly valuable or strategically important, or both, for Vainamoinen's crew to go to this much trouble. They had to have flown through the storm to get here, using their magic-worker's power to keep their airship intact and speed their way.  
  
"I thought you wanted the crate. That'll destroy it." He said it automatically, then belatedly realized that being a smart-ass to Mathias Køhler was usually not a good idea. It only encouraged him.  
  
There was a brief pause, and then Køhler could clearly be heard saying, "Lukas, help me out here."  
  
"Land," Lukas's voice said flatly. "Or you will be shot down. Better to see it destroyed than in Thembrian hands."  
  
They could do it, Alfred knew. Køhler 's plane might be smaller than the Sea Eagle, but it would be armed with a machine gun, while their own plane was defenseless. And the lighter fighter plane could outperform the heavier Sea Eagle – with the airship in front of them, they couldn't reach the island's harbor to dock, and with Køhler overhead, fleeing back to the open ocean wasn't a surefire escape either.  
  
"No way," he said. "I took a commission to deliver this crate. It's a sacred charge."  
  
"Just do it," Matthew hissed. "We can give the money back.  
  
Alfred glared at him. "Hell no." He didn't back down from bullies, whether they were pirates or Nordmenn privateers. Forget the money – they'd given their word to deliver the crate, with their reputations riding on the line if they didn't.  
  
Tracer bullets flashed brightly against the dark sky as the biplane fired a burst from its machine gun. Most of the fire went wide, off to their left, but Alfred could distinctly hear – and feel – the impact as the last few bullets hit the Sea Eagle's left wing.  
  
"You're paying to repair that!" he shouted.  
  
"Next time I won't miss," Køhler said. "Come on, I like you boys. Don't make me shoot you again."  
  
"I liked you, too," Matthew said – thankfully not with his radio button depressed. "I think I'm changing my mind."  
  
They could try to run, but with little more than fumes left in their fuel tanks, they'd end up landing in the ocean after only a few miles. And then the Nordmenn would overtake them again, while they were sitting ducks on the water.  
  
On the water in the open ocean, where things nearly as dangerous as hostile aircraft would be coming up from the depths again now that the storm was over.  
  
The air rippled off to their right, and a second airship appeared out of the night. Literally appeared, its grey bulk materializing out of nowhere.  
  
Alfred swore. Only one airship in the archipelago had a magic worker strong enough to cloak them from sight that way.  
  
The _Ariel_ opened fire, the guns in its gondala strafing Mathias's plane. They didn't aim at the other airship. No one ever fired at an airship at close range; the risk of getting caught in the resulting explosion was too great.  
  
Just firing guns loaded with phosphorous tracer from on board was a risk most airship captains wouldn't have taken, but Arthur Kirkland had an advantage that even his magic couldn't equal – his airship was built Albian-style, filled with inert helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen.  
  
And now Alfred was going to have to be grateful to him.  
  
"Back off, Berwald, Tino. This one's mine."  
  
"I don't need your help!" Alfred snapped.  
  
"Actually…" Matthew said, hesitantly, "we kind of do. The fuel levels are dropping really fast. I think there's a leak in one of the fuel tanks."  
  
Great. Just great. Well, at least they hadn't blown up.  
  
On the radio, Arthur was still talking, his smug superiority carrying through clearly even over a bad transmission. "Well, if you'd prefer to crash, bail out, and then have my crew pluck you out of the water, that's fine, too, but this way you get to keep your plane."  
  
"What way?"  
  
"Dock, you idiot, before Vash actually has to shoot someone."  
  
Dock? Alfred stared at the _Ariel_ – larger than the Nordic vessel, but surely not large enough to hold a twin-engine cargo plane like the Sea Eagle. Even the big Thuringian and Thembrian military airships only carried small parasite fighters.  
  
"You're either crazier than I thought, old man, or you _want_ to kill us both."  
  
"Our ship's roomier than it looks. You'll fit."  
  
"We don't have a hook installed."  
  
"What in Hel do you think you're doing, Kirkland?" Køhler shouted. "We were here first!"  
  
"You don't need one," Arthur said, as if the interruption hadn't even occurred. "Just fly under the open trapdoor, and I’ll lift you up."  
  
And trust Kirkland's magic not to just drop them into the sea when they cut their engines. Or to work at all; he'd never heard of magic being able to actually _cause_ things to happen – wards always prevented things, whether it was fire, the effects of bad weather, the gas inside an airship's gas bag expanding too far and tearing it open, or being seen by unwanted eyes.  
  
Matthew was making frantic motions at the fuel gauge.  
  
"Fine," Alfred muttered. He repeated it, more loudly, for Arthur's benefit. "Fine. This better _work_ , Arthur."  
  
The entire process was unnatural enough to make his skin itch. Matching their speed to the _Ariel_ was easy enough, even in the near-dark – airships were slow, but luckily not too slow for the Sea Eagle to keep pace with them. Flying so closely underneath the airship set off all his internal alarm bells, as he forced himself not to pull away, dive, bank to the side, anything to avoid a collision.  
  
And then the surely-far-too-small hanger doors opened in the bottom of the airship, and Arthur's magic took over. The Sea Eagle rose vertically, the movement completely unnatural, and it took everything he had to take his hands off the controls and not fight to restore the plane to normal flight.  
  
Beside him, Matthew was biting his lip, both his hands drawn into his chest and balled into fists to keep them away from the co-pilot's yoke.  
  
At least he wasn't the only one who found this disturbing.  
  
The entire plane shuddered, the top of the canopy clanking hard against something in a way that made Alfred wince, and the doors below them began to close. Over the radio, he could hear Køhler swearing at them in Hreidgotlander.  
  
For a long minute, he and Matthew just sat there. The inside of the airship was cavernous, the Sea Eagle's wingspan fitting inside it with feet to spare on either side. He'd always thought the gas cells would take up more room.  
  
Matthew was the first to unstrap himself from his seat and get up. "I'm going to check the left wing."  
  
Alfred nodded, unfastening his own harness. There would be something to stand on outside. The plane wouldn't just be hovering in space.  
  
It couldn't be. Even Arthur didn't have that much power.  
  
It had always puzzled him, what someone with Arthur Kirkland's magical abilities was doing flying a pirate ship in the Southern Archipelago, practically at the edge of civilization.  
  
There was a metal catwalk running alongside the airplane, below and slightly to the right. Alfred straightened his spine, refused to think too hard about what was holding the Sea Eagle up, and stepped out on to it.  
  
Some kind of large metal plate, he saw, when he looked back at his plane. The top of the fuselage was stuck to it as firmly as firmly as if it were a giant magnet, but whatever force was holding it together had to be something else entirely. The Sea Eagle's compass had been behaving normally.  
  
The catwalk stretched away in front of them for over a dozen yards, until it met the top of the ship's gondola. It should have been dark, but a faint, sourceless illumination lit everything around them, leaving no shadowed corners anywhere.  
  
This whole situation just kept getting creepier. Weather wards and anti-combustion wards were among the miracles of modern life. _This_ kind of magic, on the other hand, was too much like the way the empty water at the center of the archipelago glowed on moonless nights. Oppressive. Unnatural.  
  
The door set into the roof of the gondola swung open, and Kiku, Arthur's first mate, climbed out onto the catwalk. Xiao Chun followed behind him, almost indistinguishable from a boy with her short hair and men's work overalls.  
  
Then Arthur appeared.  
  
He wasn't wearing the coat, despite the cold temperature inside the hanger bay. He looked somehow smaller without it, his shoulders less broad.  
  
Alfred squared his shoulders and pulled his leather flying helmet off, resisting the urge to run a hand over his hair to smooth it down.  
  
Matthew stepped forward, smiling and holding out his hand. "Thanks for the help."  
  
Arthur ginned back at him. "You're welcome. Now," he pulled a pistol from the holster at his thigh – probably a .22, small enough for ricochets to do as little damage to the interior of the airship as possible – and aimed it directly at Alfred, "hand over your cargo."  
  
Kiku had drawn his sword, two feet of naked steel gleaming faintly in the creepy, sourceless light. Beside him, Xiao Chun had produced a pair of small, handle-less knives.  
  
Matthew took a step backward, looking far more surprised than he ought to have. "You said you'd help us!" he accused.  
  
"Oh, come on," Alfred told him. "You didn't see this coming?"  
  
Arthur, damn him, was still grinning that smug grin. "I said I'd help you. I didn't say that help would be free."  
  


***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hook/trapeze arrangement described here was actually used to deploy fighter aircraft from the dirigibles USS Macon and USS Akron (No, really, we swear! There are pictures). It worked reasonably well, for something so goofy-looking – the navy only discontinued the practice because both airships crashed and were destroyed (that happened to a lot of rigid airships – of the five airships operated by the US Navy in the 1920s and 30s, three crashed in storms or were destroyed by structural failures in high winds). Aircraft carried aboard and deployed from airships (or any other larger aircraft) are officially called "parasite fighters," which is probably one of the cooler-sounding military terms out there.
> 
> Alfred and Matthew's "Sea Eagle" is partially based on the PBY Catalina (which is technically cheating, since it's from WWII rather than the late-20s/early-30s), pretty much entirely because the Catalina is what Baloo's Sea Duck in TailSpin is modeled after.
> 
> Visible facial scars from dueling (with fencing foils) were considered fashionable and "cool" in certain social circles in late-19th/early 20th century Germany. So we've given Gilbert Nyotalia!Prussia's facial scar.


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
The Sea Eagle's cargo proved to be a single wooden crate, measuring approximately two feet square. Considering the amount of effort Vainamoinen and Oxenstierna had gone to in order to try and seize it, sailing out in the teeth of a storm and spilling Vainamoinen's magic like water in order to stay in one piece, Arthur had expected, well, more. He considered sending Kiku back to take over the bridge and calling Vash down – his gunner could estimate the value of almost anything at a glance – then realized he was stalling.  
  
It was just one crate, but whatever was in it made his skin crawl even from six feet away.  
  
"Open it," he ordered.  
  
While Alfred and Matthew watched sullenly, neither appearing all that grateful to be saved, Kiku and Xiao Chun attacked the crate with a pry bar they'd found in the Eagle's cargo space. The lid came free with a creaking noise of stressed wood, and revealed a layer of crumpled newspaper.  
  
"Stop it," Matthew protested. "Whatever it is, you're going to break it."  
  
"They don't care," Alfred said. "Because they're no good thieving bastards." He spoke loudly, just in case Arthur might not be listening; Alfred had never been subtle.  
  
No good thieving bastards who had saved their ungrateful lives, Arthur thought. Embarrassingly, though he'd followed the Nordmenn's airship because they were clearly on the trail of something big, when he'd seen their escort pilot firing on the Sea Eagle, he hadn't even thought about the potential value of whatever the brothers might be transporting.   
  
No matter how much of an obnoxious brat Alfred had grown up to be, he and Matthew were still the same two boys Arthur had known as a child. They had been all he had, once, before they had been adopted and left him behind in the orphanage without so much as a backward glance.  
  
Xiao Chun shoveled newspaper aside and lifted out a small, dark green statue, about a foot in height. "Is this, like, it?"  
  
It was carved from some kind of smooth stone - green marble, perhaps, or malachite - and polished either by design or by millennia spent under the waves. From mid-thigh downward, it was a human figure, but the head belonged to some kind of sea creature, and the entire upper body was hidden by a writhing mass of tentacles.  
  
He could feel the power coming off it in waves, making the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Arthur had seen carvings in this style before, though never with this kind of energy shrouding them. The statue had come from one of the sunken cities in the center of the archipelago.  
  
There had been land there, once, before the great earthquake and the massive volcanic eruption that had accompanied it sank the central islands into the sea. In some places, the water was shallow enough that you could see the ruins of ancient buildings on the sea bed, and divers would occasionally risk the sea life and still-unstable sea floor to explore them.  
  
Some of the ones who survived brought back artifacts like this.  
  
"I'm with her," Alfred said. "All this trouble over one little statue? You should just give it back to us."  
  
Arthur was tempted to snap at both of them to be less oblivious. As always, Alfred was proving to have the magical sensitivity of a rock. Rather less than this piece of rock, actually. Xiao Chun, he wasn't sure about. She'd been a member of his crew for several months, and he still hadn't managed to figure out when she was serious, and when that diffident attitude was an act.  
  
Kiku was studying the statue closely, though he made no move to take it from Xiao Chun. Maybe he could feel it, too. "It's from before the old island sank. It must be over two thousand years old."  
  
"Well, obviously," Alfred snorted. "But without any inscriptions carved on it, it can't be worth enough to die over, even carved from malachite like this instead of limestone. There's a whole museum of pottery fragments and little statues just like this on the main island."  
  
He was wrong, Arthur knew. Its historical or archeological value was immaterial; anything that gave off this much power was worth a small fortune. And whatever the Thembrians who'd hired Alfred to transport it had wanted it for, it hadn't included putting it in a museum.  
  
"And this particular statue's mine," he said, smirking at Alfred and hoping it wasn't obvious that it was making his skin crawl. He couldn't wait to have a closer look at it. "Kiku and Xiao Chun will show you two to your quarters," he went on, speaking to Matthew rather than Alfred. Of the two of them, the younger Jones brother was more likely to be reasonable about this.  
  
Alfred started to protest, but Arthur kept talking. "Put them in the empty room next to Vash's until we get to Ninguaria. He'll make sure they don't decide to go wandering." Vash slept with several very large guns, and would take virtually any action on their unwilling passengers' part as a sign of suspicious intentions.  
  
"If you think we're just going to go along willingly to whatever horrible cell you want to throw us into-"  
  
"They're perfectly nice empty crew quarters, Mr. Jones," Kiku said, with a patience Arthur could only envy.  
  
He did his best to ignore their guests as his crew escorted them out. He wasn’t in the mood for a lengthy argument with Alfred. Not when he could be inspecting Alfred's so-valuable-the-Nordmenn-were-willing-to-kill-for-it cargo.  
  
It positively reeked of dark magic, enough that he had been able to sense it even while it was still inside the crate. The Sea Eagle had practically leapt inside the airship, as if its cargo had been eager for Arthur to possess it.  
  
Things that wanted you to have them were usually bad news.  
  
The twisted, knotted mass of tentacles were carved in such details that they almost looked as if they were moving. "What did the Thembrians have planned for you?" he asked, as he studied the statue lying on its bed of newspapers and debated whether or not he ought to pick it up. Whatever it was, it couldn't be pleasant. Arthur knew relatively little about Thembrian magical traditions, but the power soaked into this piece of ancient stone wouldn’t lend itself easily to anything but destruction.  
  
The power lying dormant in artifacts like this could be tapped, used to augment a practitioner's own strength to fuel a spell or a set of wards, but there were other, more easily obtainable ways of boosting magical power, and they were rarely in short supply during a war. Going by what he'd heard from Thuringian and Armorican sailors and aircrew, prisoners taken by the Thembrians had a habit of disappearing.  
  
Then again, going by what you heard from Thembrians, Thuringians sacrificed their prisoners of war to their one-eyed god by ripping their lungs out; filtering out the truth from both sets of imperial propaganda was difficult at the best of times.  
  
He made up his mind and reached for the statue, steeling himself against the tempting flood of power.  
  
His fingers had barely brushed the stone when a high-pitched whoop of glee echoed off the steel framework around him.  
  
"It's huge! Two engines, wow. How many guns does it have?"  
  
Arthur pulled his hand back and turned to face his youngest and most inconvenient crew member. "None," he said. "It's a mail plane." He rubbed his fingers together, resisting the urge to wipe them on his coat – the stone had been cool and smooth to the touch, almost wet-feeling.   
  
"Oh." Peter looked briefly disappointed, and then his grin returned full-force. "We'll have to add them. Do you think Vash will let me borrow some if I ask?" He rushed onward, not giving Arthur a chance to answer. "It's barely even damaged. They must be real aces to fly through that storm without any wards up. I'll be even better someday, though."  
  
The kid wasn't entirely wrong – Alfred might be a loud-mouthed idiot, but he was a legitimately skilled pilot, and Matthew was no slouch, either. If he was going to pick a hero to idealize, though, Alfred was almost as poor a choice as Matthias, though at least he didn't have the Nordmann's taste for alcohol. "We aren't keeping it," Arthur told him. "We're putting both of them ashore with it when we get to the main island."  
  
"But we captured it fair and square!"   
  
"It's their entire livelihood. We're not keeping it."  
  
Peter glared at him, enthusiasm replaced by sullen outrage at this terrible injustice. "You're a lousy pirate," he said, with a whine in his tone that made him sound younger than his twelve years. "Why do we care about their stupid livelihood?"  
  
"Who asked for your opinion, brat?" he snapped. He didn't care. Or he shouldn't, anyway. Alfred and Matthew had bought their first plane with their adopted father's money, after the old man had died. Arthur had had to fight for everything he owned, starting as a crewman on a string of Albian ships of when he was barely older than Peter. The first few had been surface ships, some old enough to predate the invention of airships entirely. He still had the scars on the soles of his feet from climbing over the jagged volcanic rock of some of the archipelago's less hospitable beaches.  
  
He'd found an old bronze bracelet among the rocks on New Servage once, dented and encrusted with verdigris. Like everything that came out of the smoking sea, it had born faint traces of dark magic.  
  
He'd worn it for nearly a year, despite the fact that it had turned the skin of his wrist green. Then he'd met Bonnefoy, who'd mocked him mercilessly for wearing something so grimy and unrefined, and had been stupid enough to sell it to the Ninguaria museum. He'd gotten five dollars for it, which had been enough money to shut Bonnefoy up quite satisfactorily, but if he'd kept it...  
  
The statue felt similar, but much, much stronger, and the bracelet hadn't had that almost subliminal slimy and damp feeling. Because it had only absorbed traces of power, while this had been deliberately imbued with it? Because it had spent who knew how long lying among the rocks, exposed to the sun?  
  
Peter sneered, an expression Arthur recognized from his own mirror; he wondered how long the kid had been practicing it. "When I'm captain, I'm going to be a real pirate and not just give people's stupid stuff right back to them."  
  
"I'm sure you will be," Arthur said, and turned back toward the statue, picking it up to investigate the thing's face more closely. It was heavy enough that he needed to use both hands or else risk dropping it, and the bones of his hands ached where he touched it.   
  
Behind him, Peter stomped out as loudly as he'd entered. Sulking again. He'd been doing that a lot lately.  
  
He'd get over it. They didn't have enough room to keep the Sea Eagle on board permanently, and using magic to lift it into and out of the  _Ariel_  over and over wouldn't be practical in the long run. It wasn't made to be a parasite aircraft.  
  
Cold, dense power coiled around his hands, and after a while, the ache in his bones faded into a dull numbness that was almost pleasant. For a moment, as he stared into the statue's tiny, oddly-shaped eyes, Arthur could hear something whispering.  
  


***

  
  
He didn't actually have to check over the maintenance work himself – that wasn't an officer's job, especially not the commander of a hunting squadron – but he always felt better about flying when he made sure everything had been taken care of properly. There was never time for a proper pre-flight when the squadron was scrambled, which made proper maintenance even more important.  
  
At least Feliciano –ha, no, it was Airman Vargas now – had actually listened to him instead of trying to paw everything in the cockpit, which meant he hadn't accidentally reset the altimeter to the wrong height or otherwise fucked something on the instrument panel up. Or, worse, fucked up his flight. Gilbert was a talented enough pilot to be able to handle a passenger accidentally planting a foot on a rudder pedal or jamming their knee into the stick, of course, but it was annoying when people were deliberately stupid about it.  
  
He'd managed to cure the last staff officer he'd ferried up of the habit by pretending to lose control of the plane and deliberately putting it into a spin, but Ludwig hadn't fallen for his apologies to the man. His baby brother had learned a lot of choice language in the navy.  
  
He checked the trapeze hook, flight control surfaces, engine cowling, and landing gear for corrosion after every flight, checked the fuel and oil levels, tested the tension in the wing wires, and pulled off each engine cowling in their ridiculously tiny stable of airplanes to have a look at the engines.  
  
The  _Iron Cross's_  maintenance crew hated it. They also nearly always missed something; you didn't get sent to patrol the Northern Straights for being good at your job, unless you were  _too_  good at it to the point of making important people look bad, like Ludwig had been. Or so good that you made half the air corps jealous enough to look for petty excuses to get rid of you.  
  
It wasn't all bad, though. Too much playing air support and strafing enemy ships and not enough dogfighting, but he had a feeling things were going to get a lot more entertaining around here now that Roderich's klutzy little cousin had shown up.  
  
The look on Ludwig's face when the kid had practically landed on his boots had been amazing.  
  
He'd gaped down at him, for once dropping that stoic dignity that he always clung to steadfastly. Ludwig was young for his rank, probably the youngest captain in the fleet, and his desire to prove worthy of his promotion was painfully obvious, even if that promotion had been a punishment in disguise.   
  
Gilbert snorted at the thought. As if a Beilschmidt could ever be anything but worthy. War was in their blood, and they were damn good at it.  
  
He ducked under the trailing edge of his plane's top wing, moving along the catwalk that ran around and across the hanger space. The bottom of the  _Cross_  curved far below, and the interior framework marched off in neatly symmetrical rows before and behind him, like a vast copy of a plane's wing wires.  
  
His own plane wasn't nearly as elegant, not with the big, asymmetrical trapeze hook on top and the undersized wingspan, but it didn't need to be. The Lu 112 monoplanes his old squadron had flown has been sleeker and faster, but he'd made the third of his airship kills in the  _Cross's_  little biplanes. They hadn't let him down yet. He patted his plane on the nose, automatically keeping his arm out of the circumference of the prop blades, and turned to leave the hanger.  
  
Roderich ought to be off duty by now. And being Roderich, he'd be back in his quarters reading, because the  _Cross_ 's first officer and signal man had no life outside of books, his duties, and practicing the violin.  
  
Back home, it had been the piano, but he'd had to leave that behind when he joined the Navy.  
  
What did Elizaveta see in the man? He was handsome, if not as good-looking as Gilbert, but an aristocratically chiseled profile and appealingly tousled hair didn't make up for being an insufferable prig.   
  
The airship's crew quarters were halfway down the length of the ship's gondola, a short walk from the hanger space. Everything on the  _Cross_  was a short walk, except for the maintenance catwalks running the length of the balloon.  
  
He passed at least half a dozen crewmen on his way to the quarters that should have been his; only three of them bothered to salute. He could have reprimanded them for that – outside of their direct chain of command or not, he was still one of the highest-ranked officers on the ship – but why waste the time? Ludwig would straighten them out eventually.  
  
The airship's crew quarters were divided between enlisted common barracks, junior officers common barracks, senior officers' quarters (a small stateroom that was normally shared between two or three men, including the first officer and the air corps commander), and the captain's quarters. A naval destroyer would have had female enlisted and female officers' barracks as well, but airships, like submarines, had such limited space that the navy didn't normally assign women to them. The air corps, on the other hand, used to ground air bases or the comparatively roomy crew space of aircraft carriers, had never bothered with such regulations. Which was how Elizaveta had ended up there, the only woman on board, if you didn't count Roderich. Well, and Bella, but she was a medical corpsman, and that wasn't the same thing as a real officer.  
  
Gilbert would normally have shared the senior officers' wardroom with Roderich and the ship's medical officer, but Bella and Elizaveta's presence complicated things. Bella had volunteered to sleep on a cot in the tiny medical office (Ludwig had had a bunk installed for her, safely bolted to the wall), and Ludwig had summarily kicked Gilbert out of his wardroom and into the junior officers' quarters and given the room to Roderich and Elizaveta, so they could play house together in wedded bliss.  
  
He rapped on the door frame and slid the door open in the same motion, only to be greeted by the entirely unwelcome sight of Elizaveta and Roderich in a partial embrace.  
  
Elizaveta's hair was down, a thick curtain of golden brown hanging nearly to her waist. It looked soft, and curlier than he remembered; it was crinkled in places from being pulled back in a braid, he realized. The ends just brushed the small of her back, where Roderich's hand was molded against the back of her uniform jacket.  
  
Roderich's free hand was braced against the edge of the room's upper bunk, and his face as he looked down at his wife was soft with an affection Gilbert had never seen on it before, his eyes half-dazed behind glass lenses and a faint smile on his lips. Then he saw Gilbert in the doorway, and all that open affection closed off into annoyance.  
  
"Civilized people knock, Gilbert," he said, drawing back from Elizaveta and removing his hand from where it had been almost touching her ass. He pushed his glasses back up his nose with a little jerk, face flushing slightly.   
  
Looked like the free show was over.  
  
"I did knock." Gilbert grinned at him, slouching against the door frame. "I guess you were too distracted to hear."  
  
Elizaveta tugged her uniform jacket straight and turned; unlike Roderich, she didn't look the slightest bit embarrassed. "Did you want something, hauptmann?" Somehow she managed to make his rank sound like a dismissal.  
  
She'd change her mind in a moment. Gilbert's grin stretched wider, a real smile now and not something he'd put on just to annoy Roderich. There was always something satisfying about being the first person to know a piece of news, whether it was good or bad. "I ferried up a new airman today."  
  
"Did he throw up on you?" she asked, sounding as if she hoped the answer was yes.  
  
"I'm a much better pilot than Sadiq," he reminded her.   
  
"Do you ever stop bragging?" Roderich glanced pointedly from Gilbert to the door, probably wishing he had the balls to just ask him to leave so that he could continue making out with his wife.  
  
"I never brag. It's not bragging when it's the truth. Anyway, guess who I brought onboard this afternoon."  
  
"A new cook who knows how to make proper coffee."  
  
"No, he's being assigned to the maintenance roster. I'll give you another guess. Think small and clumsy, and picture him wearing one of her pinafores."  
  
Roderich stared at him blankly. "I'd rather not."  
  
"Oh, come on. Remember your cousin? The one Ludwig used to play with?"  
  
"Feliciano is here?" Roderich straightened up from his partial slouch against the bunk and turned to face Gilbert fully, his eyes going wide and his eyebrows going up in a way that, combined with the glasses, made him look slightly owlish.  
  
"It's Airman Vargas, now. He's got the uniform and everything." A wrinkled uniform with a jacket that was slightly too big, which had only heightened how young he looked. It had almost made Gilbert feel old, which wasn't something that happened often.  
  
"Really?" Elizaveta leaned forward, all her attention on Gilbert now. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone, and she hadn't fastened them back up, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the inside slope of her breasts, full and rounded and visible in a way that meant that whatever brassiere she was wearing under that shirt was definitely not standard military issue. She certainly hadn't had breasts like that back when they were kids, just knobby knees and fists a lot harder than a girl's were supposed to be. "Little Feliciano? Last time I saw him, his voice had just broken."  
  
Roderich was frowning now, pulling his shirt cuffs straight as if he'd just noticed that they were crumpled. "What did he do to get sent here?"  
  
Gilbert shrugged. "I don't know, but he's going to be a disaster as a soldier." He grinned, remembering the kid's spectacular pratfall in the hanger bay. "He tripped over his own feet getting out of my plane and nearly landed on Ludwig's boots. It was hilarious."  
  
"I wish I'd seen that," Elizaveta said. She didn’t quite grin back, but there was definitely a smile on her lips. "Did his expression actually change?"  
  
He'd looked almost as stunned as he had the Gilbert had taken him out with the boys to an Odraburg nightclub and one of Gilbert's old squadronmates had thrown up on him. Somewhere between shock and embarrassed horror. "I thought he was going to choke. He still thought the kid was a girl."  
  
Roderich shook his head. "Where on earth did the two of you ever get that idea?"  
  
Gilbert felt himself flushing, and the fact that he knew both of them would be able to see it just made his face heat further. "The first time we met him, he was wearing a dress." Between that and the long ringlets, they'd just assumed Ludwig's new playmate was a little girl without questioning it.  
  
Elizaveta broke into a grin, her face lighting up with the smile in a way that made Gilbert almost not mind that it was at his expense.  
  
"Ah yes, I remember." Roderich was smiling now, too, openly amused at the memory. "You used to dress him up like a doll."  
  
She shrugged. "He always looked so much prettier than I did in my dresses."  
  
"I don't know about that." That soft look in his eyes came back, and suddenly it was as if Gilbert were no longer in the room.  
  
"I'm surprised Feliciano was conscripted," Gilbert said, hopefully loudly enough to break through the haze of romantic sentiment. "It's supposed to be the oldest son. Whatever happened to his big brother, what's his name, the bratty one?"  
  
"You mean Lovino?" Roderich waved a hand dismissively, managing to imbue the gesture with generations worth of aristocratic breeding. "There was some scandal a couple of years ago. He ran away to the islands."  
  
The Southern Archipelago was the favorite destination for Ionians and Armoricans who needed to escape debts, the law, or scandals. "Got a girl pregnant, huh?" Feliciano and his brother had been close to the same age – had they actually been twins? – which meant that 'a couple of years ago,' he'd probably have been about sixteen. Apparently, big brother Vargas had been precocious.  
  
Roderich shook his head. "No, I think it was about stealing." From the tone of his voice, he considered that only slightly less disgraceful.  
  
Unless it involved banks or embezzlement, theft was usually a lot easier to cover up than pregnant lovers. Unless Lovino had made off with a truckload of cash, or stolen from the wrong person. Precocious indeed.   
  
"I remember that," Elizaveta was saying. "Your great-uncle was furious."  
  
Roderich snorted. "He was probably only angry that the kid got caught." Even his disgusted eyeroll managed to somehow be condescendingly aristocratic. "Julius Vargas used to be one of the biggest smugglers in Ionia. For all I know, he still is."  
  
And wouldn't that just burn the high-and-mighty Edelsteins right where it hurt. Gilbert had never been clear on how exactly an Ionian ex-soldier-turned-fisherman had managed to marry into one of the oldest families in Thuringia.  
  
Oldest titled families, anyway. There had been Beilschmidts fighting in Thuringia's armies and war bands and raiding parties since the days when men had still sacrificed their enemies to Odin.  
  
Elizaveta sat down on the lower bunk – one of the only pieces of furniture in the room other than the foldout writing desk and the chair bolted to the floor. Sitting cross-legged, with her face half in shadow, she looked barely older than the girl Gilbert had once played at being vikings and knights-in-armor with. Then she shifted forward a little, the light silhouetting the curve of her breast, and the illusion was very attractively ruined.  
  
"We'll have to make him welcome," she said to Roderich. "Your cousin, I mean. He was such a sweet kid." She grinned impishly. "It's so cute and romantic when childhood friends are reunited."  
  
"Not necessarily." There hadn't been anything romantic about his reunion with Elizaveta. She'd strolled into his hanger – the old one, the one he'd had before the fourth dueling incident – criticizing the squadron's discipline and barking out a demand to know who the idiot who'd done a barrel roll over the field at 400 feet was. When Gilbert had informed her that the 'idiot' was her new commanding officer, she had thrown the folder with her new orders in it at him and stormed away.  
  
Then she'd refused to let him buy her a drink at the officers' mess, but had insisted on inviting him to dinner with her and Roderich. Because she'd dragged her new husband into the military along with her, and he wasn't being reunited with just one childhood acquaintance, but two.  
  
He'd given her a pair of cufflinks before he'd left, expensive ones shaped like the Thuringrike's eagle. She was wearing Roderich's wedding ring instead, and the fact that she'd eventually stopped wearing it because it got snagged on things when doing emergency repairs on aircraft engines didn't change that.  
  
He didn't know why he'd expected anything different – they'd been engaged since they were children. Had in fact been months away from marrying when he'd left to enlist.  
  
"You think everything is romantic," Roderich said.  
  
"Well, one of us has to," she returned. "You think romance is practicing the piano while I'm in the next room and Gilbert thinks it's… actually, I don't think he has any idea what romance is."  
  
"Who needs romance? It just gets in the way of a good time." He leered at both of them, as obnoxiously as he knew how. It was better than protesting the he did, too, know what romance was, and offering some pathetic example, like buying a woman dinner or giving her jewelry.  
  
Apparently, those weren't romance by Elizaveta's standards any more than piano practice was.  
  
"Maybe I should have just challenged  _you_  to a duel," he blurted out, then felt his face go bright red. "Or I don't know, it's hard to tell. You've gone all girly since then. Maybe you just liked the way Roderich's ass looked in tight, white pants."  
  
It was all downhill from there.   
  
By the time he stomped out the wardroom a few minutes later, even Roderich had abandoned his dignity and started shouting.  
  


***

  
  
  
  
The room they had been taken to had been perfectly nice, aside from the heavily-armed pirate right next door. The beds had even been comfortable enough for them to grab a few hours of sleep on the way from Antillia to Ninguaria. Alfred would have preferred to be thrown in the brig, honestly.  
  
"Yes, you already said that," Matthew muttered. "I don't think they actually have a brig."  
  
"They probably just throw people into the ocean."  
  
They had been woken for breakfast by Peter banging on their door and shouting, which was just surreal. It had all been very domestic, as if they weren't kidnaped prisoners.  
  
Somehow, it made the prospect of having to go and inform their Thembrian customers that they'd lost their cargo even more humiliating. 'We've lost your cargo to pirates who served us toast and raspberry jam for breakfast.' Yes, their toast had been burned, but so had everyone else's.   
  
There had even been milk for the coffee, which was nearly a luxury in the islands, which had a lot of lizards and birds, but not much pasture space for cows.  
  
"This is humiliating." How were they going to explain this? They'd have to give the money back, of course, but that wouldn't change the fact that they'd broken their contract. After Sergeyevich had asked for them by name, because he'd been told they were the best. "Eagle Transport has never lost a cargo!"  
  
"You already said that, too."  
  
Damn Arthur. How did he always find a way to make Alfred feel like a stupid little kid?  
  
He'd tried his best to change Arthur's mind, or appeal to whatever conscience the man had, but all that had earned him was a shouting match. Even offering to actually pay Arthur for the statue had done no good.  
  
He'd been just about ready to try  _beating_  the thing out of him when Kiku unsheathed his sword and requested that Alfred and Matthew please politely leave the ship.   
  
Okay, physically beating a concession out of Arthur would probably have been wrong, given that Arthur was nearly a half-foot shorter than he was, but damn it, Alfred was the victim here!   
  
Matthew was trying to be The Reasonable One, but Alfred could see the muscles in his jaw flexing as he silently ground his teeth.   
  
Somehow, that just made Alfred want to shout and rant louder. What was the point in pretending to be calm when their cargo was gone, their airplane was expensively damaged, and their bank account was about to be empty?  
  
The Thembrian Consulate was a small building – all the official buildings on Ninguaria were small, except the Governor's house and the museum – built of the same white-washed wood as all the buildings around it. Alfred had always been slightly disappointed by it; foreign government's buildings, he felt, should look foreign, and he'd read about Thembrian shrines and palaces having towers and domes. All this one had was a red flag emblazoned with the Thembrian bear flying from its roof.   
  
Inside, it was just as ordinary-looking, aside from the black-and-red uniformed guard waiting in the front hallway.  
  
He eyed them with visible skepticism before asking them to state their business, and Alfred was suddenly embarrassingly conscious that he'd been wearing the same clothes since yesterday morning, and that his wrinkled trousers had an oil stain on the left knee. At least he'd shaved before they left the airship; Matthew had asked the gun-happy pirate guarding them to loan him a razor.  
  
"We're Eagle Transport. A Mr. Kazimir Sergeyevich commissioned us to make a delivery to the ambassador?"  
  
"Sergeyevich?" The soldier's eyes widened a little, and he looked from one of them to the other, the disapproval of a moment ago gone. "I- that is-" he stammered, then collected himself. "You stay here," he ordered. "I will get Captain Arlovskaya.  
  
He almost scurried out of the hall.  
  
"I don't think this is good," Matthew muttered softly.   
  
"The ambassador's probably angry that we're late." Alfred winced; he was only going to get more unhappy when they explained  _why_  they were here at quarter-past-noon instead of the dawn arrival they'd been hired for.  
  
Now that he had a chance to look around the hallway, it wasn't quite as bland as it had first seemed; the wall paper was peeling at the corners, of course, a remnant of the summer storm season, but the red and gold brocade was richly colored. A nice contrast to the pale colors everyone always pretended made rooms feel cooler.  
  
They'd probably given up when they realized that no decorating trick was going to make this place feel cool. A consulate out at the ends of the earth obviously didn't rate a magic-worker; it was even hotter and stuffier in here than it was outside.  
  
The soldier returned, wooden-faced. "Come with me," he ordered, and then refused to answer any of Alfred's questions about to where, or who they were being taken to see. He didn't even respond to Matthew's attempt to apologize for their lateness.  
  
They were led down the hall – silently – and through an office where a pair of equally silent men sat at desks and stared at them, and then to the door of a smaller study off to the side of the main room. The soldier knocked on the doorframe gently, then stuck his head inside and said something in Thembrian, saluted, and practically pushed Alfred and Matthew through the doorway.  
  
He shut the door behind them.  
  
A woman sat behind a desk larger and more impressive-looking than the two outside. She, too, was in uniform, pale hair pinned severely back, and wore a star-shaped medal over her left breast and a cold expression.  
  
He'd been expecting someone older and more male, but his guess about the angry part had been dead on.  
  
"You are late, gentlemen," she informed them.  
  
Matthew winced. "There was an, um, incident."  
  
Captain Arlovskaya's eyes narrowed. "An incident," she repeated.  
  
"We were attacked," Alfred said, feeling his face heat. "By pirates. They must have seen your friend hire us and followed us through the storm. They ambushed us and-"  
  
"Nobody flies in weather like that without a good reason," Matthew interrupted. "They must have guessed that we were carrying something valuable. They took the entire cargo."  
  
"They what?" Arlovskaya half-snarled the words, her face twisting with rage.  
  
Alfred was tempted to take an unheroic step back. "It's not our fault," he protested. "I even offered to buy it back from them, but they wouldn't let me!"  
  
Arlovskaya stood, her hands flat against the top of the desk. She was tall enough to look him in the eye, something a lot of men couldn't do, but he suspected she would have been intimidating even if she'd been tiny. Her face went from snarling to blank, forced calm as she almost visibly reined in her anger. "Have you any idea," she said coldly, "what you have done?"   
  
Matthew, his face red with embarrassment, took a small step forward. "We're really very sorry, ma'am. Of course we're prepared to fully reimburse you."  
  
"You had better."  
  
This, Alfred decided, as she glared at them as if they were a particularly disgusting species of bug, was the most humiliating moment of his life. Arthur was going to pay for this. The next time he saw him, he was going to smash his smug, freckled face in, smaller than him or not. "We deposited the first half of our payment in the Bank of Albia on Antillia before we took off. It usually takes at least a day for them to cable their branch on Ninguaria with deposit information, but if we write you a bank check now, you should be able to withdraw the full amount by this evening."  
  
"Given your reputation, we expected much more from you gentlemen. Your incompetence is disappointing. Everything about these filthy islands is disappointing. And returning our money is the least you can do. But," she sighed, again regaining her calm, "I suppose it isn't entirely your fault."   
  
And then she smiled at them. The pleasant little curve of lips was almost eerie on a face that had been twisted in such intense rage only minutes before. "Write the bank check for the full amount, payable to myself, and give me the names of these pirates. Then you may go."  
  
Several minutes later, they were finally able to leave, minus two hundred dollars and all of Alfred's dignity.  
  
"Arthur's not going to be happy that you ratted him out," Matthew said, as they slunk shamefacedly out of the consulate.  
  
Screw Arthur. "Well then maybe he shouldn't  _steal things_  from people."  
  
"I'm not saying he didn't deserve it."  
  
"I hope they punch his lights out for me. No, wait, I don't. I want to do it myself."  
  
"You can beat him up after we buy what we need to fix the fuel tank."  
  
Alfred swore internally. For a few blissful moments, he'd almost forgotten that they weren't done with Arthur 'thieving sonuvabitch' Kirkland yet.   
  
The Eagle was still inside the  _Ariel_ 's… not exactly hanger. Thinking too hard about exactly how they had gotten it inside the airship, what was holding it in place, and how they were going to get it back out made his head hurt.  
  
He put the problem out of his mind, or tried to anyway, and made himself think about something pleasant instead. "Let's get something to eat first. I don't want to deal with his creepy magic on an empty stomach."  
  
Matthew didn't say yes or no, but when they came to the next cross street, he turned to the right, toward the collection of bars and restaurants further along the waterfront, instead of back toward the marina. "He used to be so nice," he said, as they passed the first of several bars still shut up for the day. They'd be open by midafternoon, but right now, only the places that actually served food along with their liquor were doing business. "Do you ever wonder what happened?"  
  
"No," Alfred said. A business and an airplane were enough to keep him busy without wasting his time thinking about the past. Franklin Jones had rescued them from that. He'd given them a home, a family, and a future, and with all those things to be grateful for, Alfred wasn't going to mourn for what little they had left behind. "After we fix the Eagle, we need to see about getting a new commission. The next mail run's not till Friday."  
  
They'd eat, buy what they needed to do a little soldering work on the gas tank, bid the  _Ariel_  and everyone on it a not so fond farewell, and put this whole disaster behind them. Eagle Transport had a reputation to maintain, and a pilot was only as good as his last flight.  
  
When they walked out of Ed's Diner an hour later, four men jumped them.  
  
It took Alfred a moment to realize what was happening. When the first man ran into him, shoving him back against the wall of the restaurant, he automatically tried to push him away. "Watch where you're going, asshole." Drunks at two in the afternoon? The waterfront here was going downhill.  
  
"Excuse me, please," he heard Matthew say, as he tried to step around a second man blocking his path, and just as Alfred realized that the man he'd assumed was drunk didn't smell like alcohol, a fist plowed into his gut.  
  
Alfred doubled over, wheezing, and just barely managed to dodge the man's second punch.  
  
His fist hit the wall instead, with a satisfyingly loud crack. Good. Maybe he'd broken his knuckles.  
  
Alfred's first punch, on the other hand, didn't miss.   
  
The man staggered back, hissing something guttural that Alfred could tell from his tone of voice was a curse, and trying to stem the flow of blood from his nose with one hand. Alfred grinned at him.  
  
"You shouldn't hit a guy with glasses," he informed him.  
  
He didn't even see the fist that caught him in the side of the head.  
  
His head snapped to the side, glasses sent flying off, and for a fraction of a second, it didn't even hurt.  
  
Then the pain exploded across his cheekbone, and fuck this, he didn't need to be able to see clearly in order to hit things.  
  
He threw himself at the blurry shape that had just joined the attack. "Coward." His right fist hit teeth. Ow. "Scum." The left hook he followed up with hit the man's open hand with a slap, which meant there was nothing to stop Alfred from slamming another right into his ribs as hard as he could.  
  
He actually felt something crack. The man doubled over, clutching his side, and Alfred shoved him into his hopefully broken-nosed friend as hard as he could.   
  
Two more men had appeared from somewhere and were trying to corner Matthew between them. Even half-blind he could still pick his brother out from among two strangers, so he let Matthew hit the larger and lighter-haired of the two blurry figures and rushed the one closer to him.  
  
Several moments later, Matthew had laid one of them out on the street – face down in the mud – and Alfred was kicking the man he'd knocked to his hands and knees in the ribs.  
  
"Come on," Matthew half-shouted. "Before the other two get back on their feet." He shoved Alfred's glasses into his hand, and then hauled on his arm, trying to drag him away.  
  
"That'll teach you to gang up on people," Alfred yelled, shoving his filthy glasses back on and giving the man one more kick in the ribs for emphasis. Then he turned and ran, Matthew one step ahead of him.  
  
Past two other restaurants, a dance hall, and a handful of still-closed bars, around a corner, and they were back on Porta di Vulcani's main street.   
  
"What  _was_  that?" Matthew panted, after they'd both stumbled to a halt. "No one tries to roll you in broad daylight in front of Ed's Diner." His glasses were slipping down his nose, and his bottom lip had split. He frowned, winced, and swiped at the trickle of blood, succeeding only in smearing it across his chin.  
  
Alfred shoved his own glasses back up, squinting through the smears of dirt at the crowded street around them. Their attackers were nowhere in sight. "I guess she was lying about not thinking it was our fault."  
  
Matthew just stared at him.  
  
His face hurt. A lot. It was probably going to bruise. Alfred carefully explored his hot, throbbing cheek with his fingertips and elaborated, "The captain, what's-her-name. She must have sent them after us to teach us a lesson."  
  
"And you think this because?" Matthew asked.  
  
"I heard one of them swearing in Thembrian."  
  
Matthew frowned, but didn't argue with his logic. "They must have been even angrier than they let on."  
  
Both of them watched the street for a moment. The dirt road sloped gently down to the harbor, wide enough for three cars to drive abreast and still empty of Thembrian goons. For now, anyway. They'd jumped him and his brother in broad day light in the middle of a public street; they clearly didn't care who saw them or how much attention they got, so busier streets weren't necessarily any safer.  
  
It didn't matter, he decided. They'd knocked those four on their asses in the dirt, and they'd do the same thing to anyone else that came after them.  
  
"I think," Matthew said eventually, "that we ought to go take another look at that statue. If Arthur will let us."  
  
"I think," Alfred said, "that we should  _make_  him let us."  
  


***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gilbert's old plane, the one he flew before being assigned to the Iron Cross, can be seen here: http://dielselpunk-dames.tumblr.com/post/48099130563/sea-and-sky-prussias-old-plane-the-lu-112 . It's based on the Heinkel 112, and we took the "Lu" part of its designation from Robert Lusser, an aircraft designer who worked on the Messerschmidt 109 (the plane that won the military contract the Heinkel 112 was designed for).


	3. Chapter 3

The pressurization wards needed to be renewed; flying through the storm last night had strained them to their limits with the need to keep the ship's elevation high enough to put them above the worst of the wind and rain. Go too high and push the wards too far, and the ship's gas cells would rupture from the pressure differential between their contents and the external air pressure.  Play it safe and stay too low, and the storm winds could drive the ship down into the water or simply tear the entire structure apart.  
  
On most airships, wards to regulate pressurization would have been an unacceptable power drain, regardless of the several thousand feet of extra altitude they offered, but the  _Ariel's_  helium gas bags meant that instead of channeling as much power as possible into a hydrogen airship's all-important anti-combustion wards, Arthur could divide it between regulating the gas cells' air pressure, concealing the ship from sight when necessary, and warding the entire superstructure against storms and other heavy weather. And, last night, to speed them on their way faster than engines alone would permit.  
  
It hadn't been that great a drain on his reserves, Arthur told himself. It was good for him to flex his magical muscles once in a while, and he'd been intending to renew all the wards while the  _Ariel_  was in port anyway.  
  
Granted, he'd planned on them being in port at Bonnefoy's island, but being adaptable was one of the necessities of his trade.  
  
Normally, in this part of the ship, the drone of engine noise would have been deafening.  Now, with the engines shut down so that the force of his spell couldn't spark off an explosion, it was eerily silent.  Perfect conditions for magic working.  
  
The ward spells took a great deal of power, but were reasonably simple to renew. One of the first things Arthur had done after acquiring the  _Ariel_  had been to engrave a miniature version of a ward circle on the floor of the engine compartment. It was smaller and less ornate than the ones used in Albia, but made up for it in efficiency. As with a part, so with the whole – once enchanted, the miniature circle would protect the entire ship. He'd always had a knack for sympathetic magic.  
  
Most airship wards were applied to the skin and superstructure of the ships themselves, and took days or even weeks to put in place.  Arthur's had taken him no longer than had been needed to draw the circle, chalk the symbols in, and etch the whole thing into the floor with a quick application of power.  
  
Now, he stepped into the circle, taking care to align himself with the compass rose in the center, and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.  
  
The power came easily, colder and darker than he was used to, and with a faintly clammy feel to it that he'd already come to associate with Alfred's statue.  It poured through him, the feel of it vibrating in his bones every bit as exhilarating as it had been the first time, when he'd been a boy.  
  
The circle flared to life around him, the blue-green glow visible even through closed eye-lids, where normal light would have flared red.  Despite the statue's taint, the finished spell felt reassuringly familiar as it expanded around him, wrapping itself around the airship.  
  
He stood there, eyes still closed, as the last echoes of power drained away into the wards.  
  
As he lowered his arms and opened his eyes, he heard the sound of a throat being cleared behind him.  
  
"The Jones brothers are here, Captain," Kiku said.  "Both of them.  The louder Mr. Jones is demanding to speak to you."  
  
Arthur sighed, suddenly feeling more exhausted than the expenditure of magic should have warranted.  "Tell them to come back later."  Extricating their seaplane from inside the ship was going to take nearly as much power as renewing the wards had, and after last night, he wasn't sure he had it in him.  
  
At least not before he'd had a bit of a rest and some tea.  
  
Kiku didn't go away.  
  
"They seem angry," he said.  "And, ah, bruised."  
  
"Damn right, I'm angry."  
  
Kiku jumped to the side just in time to keep Alfred from plowing straight into him.  "I told you to wait while I fetched Captain Kirkland," he protested.  
  
He could have told Kiku not to bother.  Alfred never followed directions, and he'd always been firmly convinced that good manners were for other people.  When he was even aware that they existed, that was.  
  
The leather flying jacket that Alfred insisted on wearing even in the heat was splashed with drying mud, and the left side of his face was red and swollen, already beginning to bruise.  
  
"Didn't Kiku tell you I was busy?  Maybe if you learned manners, people wouldn't feel the need to punch you in the face."  Arthur regretted the comment as soon as he'd made it; Alfred in this mood didn't need to be egged on.  
  
"Shut up!" Alfred snapped, stabbing a finger in his direction.  "It's your fault, you, you thieving weasel."  
  
Thieving weasel?  Apparently, when you were adopted and brought up by nice, well-to-do gentlemen, nobody ever taught you how to swear.  
  
Apparently oblivious to the circle on the floor still crackling with faint remnants of energy, Alfred stormed forward, shoving his way into Arthur's personal space until he loomed over him.  "You ruined my contract, destroyed my reputation, and made my customers so mad they tried to jump me and Matt in an alley!  I've been in this business three years and no one's ever had a bad word to say about us, and now thugs are jumping us in broad daylight, all because of you!"  
  
Arthur planted both hands in the middle of the other man's chest and pushed, shoving him backwards until he was no longer standing inside the circle; volatile emotions and magic never mixed well.  "If you're going to yell this loudly, would you mind standing back a bit?" he asked, deliberately keeping his voice as bored as possible.  "You're giving me a headache."  It wasn't entirely a lie.  He didn't have the energy to deal with Alfred's dramatic posturing right now.  
  
"You-" Alfred spluttered.  "You-   _I'm_  giving  _you_  a headache?"  He glared at Arthur through mud-smeared glasses, face bright red now.  
  
Before Arthur could respond with something suitably cutting, Matthew ducked into the engine compartment behind Kiku.  
  
"Alfred, we were going to negotiate with him."  
  
"I am," Alfred said, through gritted teeth.  He turned back to Arthur, and said, "Give it back, and maybe I'll consider forgiving you."  It sounded as if he'd had to force the words out.  
  
"The Thembrians are livid," Matthew added.  He sounded pretty close to that himself – his face was swollen and bruised as well, though he'd managed to come out of their alleyway encounter considerably cleaner than his brother had, and while he wasn't shouting as loudly as Alfred, he wasn't speaking with his normal quiet calm either.  "Keeping that statue is going to be more trouble than it's worth."  
  
Arthur sighed, and resisted the urge to rub at his burning eyes.  If the statue had been anything else, he'd have considered giving it to them just for the sake of making them go away.  Maybe then he could go lie down and sleep for a few hours in peace.  
  
"You told them we have it, I assume?"  Kiku said.  "It might have been a good idea to come and collect your airplane before trying to turn us over to the authorities, Mr. Jones."  That perfectly serene politeness, Arthur knew, was mostly fake.  Kiku didn't like having the Sea Eagle inside their superstructure, weighing the ship down and threatening to jar loose at any moment should Arthur's magic fail, and he liked people shoving him around the way Alfred just had even less.  
  
Alfred actually winced; he'd clearly not thought of the possibility that the Thembrians might try to have the airship seized and impounded for piracy while his plane was still inside it.  "They'll have no reason to come after you if you give them their statue back."  
  
"No," Arthur said flatly.  He hadn't decided what he was going to do with the statue yet, but handing it over to Imperial Thembria wasn't on the list.  The little statue reeked of power, and keeping it out of both Thembrian and Thuringian hands was vital.  
  
He ought to destroy it, or throw it back into the ocean it had presumably come out of; letting either side of the war get their hands on it would only end badly for everyone involved,  _especially_  neutral parties like the Archipelago. They wouldn't remain neutral and uninvolved for long if the mainland empires got it into their heads that there might be more such power to be found there.  Even Albia couldn't entirely be trusted with it.  
  
Loathe though he was to admit to it, though, he wasn't entirely sure how to go about destroying it.  Something that thoroughly imbued with magic couldn't just be smashed; either it would refuse to break, or he'd end up with a dozen smaller pieces of stone all still filled with malevolent power.  And those were the better options, the ones that didn't involve protection spells being triggered, or some kind of magical explosion.  
  
He could drop it back into the ocean, some place far from land, but someone had gone to the effort of dredging it up in the first place, and there was nothing to say they wouldn't keep looking.  And people who looked for power in the smoking sea generally found it.  
  
The ones who survived, anyway.  
  
And if Thembria kept looking, it would be much, much better to have some idea of exactly what they might find.  If he threw the statue away, and six months from now a similar artifact fell into Thembrian or Thuringian hands, Arthur would know nothing about what they'd be capable of doing with it.  
  
It must be nice to have someone you could go to for advice about things like this.  He'd taught himself magic successfully enough to duplicate, unravel, or counter almost every spell he regularly encountered, but he'd never seen anything like this before.  
  
Xiao Chun's older sister might know, but Dr. Wang Yao had been very clear about her opinion of him and his crew the last time they had spoken.  
  
"I hope they ambush  _you_  in an alley next," Alfred muttered.  
  
Arthur almost snapped back at him, but then he eyed the swelling bruises on his face and reconsidered.  They looked painful – certainly they would have  _felt_  painful – and if Alfred and Matthew had truly been jumped by a group of Thembrian thugs, then they were lucky that bruises were the worst they had received.  
  
It was ridiculous to feel guilty for stealing from them when he'd also rescued them from disaster in the process.  Losing the Sea Eagle would have hurt the brothers far more in the long run than an angry customer and a single lost cargo.  
  
He'd killed people over shipments less than half this valuable and felt nothing.  
  
"Fine," Matthew said, his voice clipped and angry.  "If you don't want to play nice, we'll just take our plane and leave.  Thank you for the transportation, Arthur."  He moved away from the door and took Alfred by the arm.  "Come on, Al.  Let's get out of here."  
  
Alfred obediently let himself be tugged toward the doorway and the catwalk beyond it, but twisted around to glare at Arthur over his shoulder.  "It's going to take us some time to fix it.  Don't come bother us."  
  
"It's my hanger," Arthur returned automatically.  
  
"I don't care.  I don't want you around  _my_  plane."  
  
Arthur turned back to the remnants of his spell circle, not bothering to watch them go.  He'd be singing a different tune as soon as he wanted to extract his precious plane from the  _Ariel's_  interior.  
  


* * *

  
  
Feliciano eased the door closed behind him with his elbow and stepped onto the bridge, carefully balancing the coffee tray in both hands.  He was probably supposed to salute, but then he might drop something.  
  
"Your coffee, sir."  
  
Ludwig – he really ought to be thinking of him as Korvettenkapitän Beilschmidt, and he'd tried, but impressive and important as Ludwig looked in his uniform, he was still Ludwig – reached up without looking at him and took a cup of coffee from the tray.  
  
"Notify me when we're within range, Leutnant," he said.  Then he took a sip of the coffee, and his face relaxed into something that was almost a smile for a moment.  
  
Making coffee was something Feliciano could do and do well, and the coffee that they'd been serving on the _Iron Cross_  before he'd been assigned to the airship's galley had been dreadful.  It was cold on the airship, enough so that men went about their duties in their winter coats even inside the gondola, so even bad coffee was in high demand.  Good coffee had gone a long way toward making up for the fact that Feliciano had been too small to rack bombs properly and had had to be re-assigned from his original posting in the ordinance bay.  
  
"Thank you, airman," Ludwig said, and Feliciano felt a flush of pride for a moment before the korvettenkapitän's previous order caught up with him.  
  
Wait, in range of what?  
  
Trying to stay to the side and out of everyone's way, Feliciano inched forward until he was close enough to the bridge's windows to see the ocean below them instead of the endless expanse of sky.  
  
There was nothing but water.  Water, more water, and… was that a ship?  
  
"We're within a half-mile of the targets, sir," one of the officers said.  "Starting descent to bombing height."  
  
"Bring us to two thousand feet," Ludwig ordered.  "And inform Hauptmann Beilschmidt that his squadron are to deploy."  
  
They were sending out the fighter planes?  They were supposed to be bombing Thembrian shipping – why did they need fighter planes for that?  Was one of the targets an aircraft carrier?  
  
There were three ships up ahead of them, too far away for Feliciano to make out what flags they were flying.  They had to be Thembrian, though.  No one but Thembrians and Kvenlanders would be in the northern straights.  
  
None of the ships looked large enough to be carrying enemy aircraft, but Feliciano began edging back from the windows anyway.  Maybe he ought to head back to the galley.  He was only going to be in the way here.  
  
His first week on-board the  _Iron Cross_  had been uneventful, the sea below them empty of ships – Thembrian or otherwise – and Feliciano had started to relax, sure that his former crew mates had exaggerated when they'd talked about how much action the Northern theater saw.  He'd nearly decided that it was only considered a punishment duty because of the cold, and that he was going to be just as safe here as he'd been in the Ionian Sea.  
  
Now they were deploying fighters and descending to bombing height and the Thembrian ships were definitely looking larger now, and yes, he really ought to go back to the galley where he belonged.  
  
The galley didn't have any windows, though, and he couldn't quite manage to make himself step out into the corridor and away from the view out the bridge's wall of windows.  Not being able to see would be worse.  
  
When he managed to force his eyes away and turned to go, he nearly ran into an airman rushing out the door.  
  
Feliciano jumped back, pressing himself against the wall, his empty silver tray held up in front of his chest like a shield.  "Sorry," he blurted out.  
  
No one heard him.  Everyone on the bridge was in motion, their attention fixated on instrument panels and the ship's intercom.  
  
In the middle of the confusion, Ludwig stood like an island of calm, a small bubble of empty space around him.  Feliciano found himself creeping closer to the other man; if anything happened, Ludwig would know what to do.  
  
For a few minutes, nothing happened, and Feliciano started to relax again.  
  
Then the ships' anti-aircraft guns opened fire.  
  
Ludwig remained calm, his expression neutral, as if he didn't even notice that they were being fired on with machine guns and were all going to die the moment a bullet hit them and ignited the hydrogen in the gas cells.  
  
"Commence bombing run," he ordered.  People did things, read off information from instrument panels, relayed orders through the ship's intercom, and suddenly a fountain of water exploded up from right next to one of the ships, followed a moment later by the sound of an explosion.  
  
Bluish-white light flashed across the windows as something set off the airship's wards; the Thembrian's guns were actually hitting them now, they were all going to burn up in a huge, flaming ball of death, and Ludwig and Roderich were going to die right along with him and why hadn't he followed Lovino and his pet smuggler to the Southern Archipelago?  
  
He was clutching the tray to his chest so hard that his fingertip's hurt, Feliciano realized.  It wouldn't protect him from an explosion, but it was better than clutching at Ludwig, which was what he really wanted to do.  Grabbing onto the captain was probably bad even when they were all about to die.  
  
A bomb hit one of the three ships, and there was fire and huge plumes of smoke, and then the tiny, colorful shapes that were Gilbert's fighter planes were diving down at the other two ships.  
  
It seemed to take hours, but couldn't really have, because no one told him to move or leave.  The first ship vanished, leaving behind a spreading collection of debris on the surface of the water, and the other two were both trailing streams of smoke when Ludwig gave the order to ascend again.  
  
Feliciano lowered his tray a little, as it gradually sank in that they weren't going to die after all.  There were lifeboats in the water, where the sunken ship had been, tiny dots of white against the grey-green, but not enough of them to have gotten the entire crew off.  There wouldn't have been room, or time.  
  
All those people, he thought.  Drowning.  There would have been dozens of sailors on ships that size.  
  
Ludwig was frowning faintly as he listened to one of the bridge crew giving a preliminary damage report.  
  
"No fighter escort," Roderich said, "and they didn't even bother to send a patrol boat out with them.  A lot of wear and tear on our wards for very little result."  
  
Ludwig shook his head slightly, his expression stern. "It may have been an unimportant shipment, but even the Thembrians only have so many ships.  We'll starve them out yet, Leutnant."  
  
"If it wasn't important," Feliciano found himself asking, "why couldn't we just let them go?"  
  
Ludwig stared at him blankly for a long moment, as if he'd forgotten Feliciano was there until he'd spoken, and couldn't quite believe that he actually had the effrontery to do so.  
  
The silence stretched out, until it felt as if everyone on the bridge were staring at him; maybe he should apologize and make a strategic retreat back to the galley?  
  
"Because we are at war, Airman Vargas," Ludwig said finally, impatience and disapproval coloring his voice.  
  
Feliciano was pretty sure he didn't like being at war.  
  


* * *

  
  
"And I haven't even gotten to sit in the cockpit," Peter said, just loudly enough to make sure that Arthur could hear him. He'd been whining about that plane ever since they'd taken it aboard, and now that Alfred and Matthew were actually repairing it, his complaints about not being allowed to climb all over it and break something had got even more vehement.  
  
And Matthew estimated that fixing everything would take at least another two days. Arthur could hardly wait.  
  
"You could just sneak in when nobody's looking, you know." Xiao Chun didn't even look back at him, apparently completely preoccupied with one of the buttons on her sleeve. If she didn't stop fiddling with it, she was going to twist it right off.  
  
"You're assuming he knows how to sneak," Arthur said. Then added, to Peter, "Don't even try it. I'm going to put wards up when we get back."  
  
Peter looked away, kicking at the ground and sending up a thin splash of mud. "You put wards around everything interesting," he muttered sullenly.  
  
"Entirely to spite you," Arthur agreed.  
  
"My brother says they'll probably try to steal their statue back."  
  
"Our statue," Xiao Chun corrected.  
  
"Our statue," Lili agreed. "He thinks they're dragging their repairs out to give themselves an opportunity."  
  
He'd wondered why Vash had so enthusiastically backed up Kiku's suggestion that they leave a second crew member on watch tonight. Normally, he only left one man to guard the ship when they were in a friendly port, but given the attack on the Jones brothers, leaving an extra man in place had made sense. The Thembrians probably wouldn't try anything so obvious, not in a public marina with police patrols and a harbormaster on hand, but just in case they did, Vash's sniper rifle and Kiku's katana were waiting for them.  
  
Arthur had initially planned to take the second watch position himself, assuming that Vash would want to take the kids out to dinner – he rarely let Lili out of his sight when in port – but both his gunner and his first mate had agreed that it was Arthur's duty as captain to take their younger crew members out on the town. "But you're so much more authoritative, Captain," Kiku had protested, over-riding his suggestion that Kiku do it.  
  
Unlike most of the other islands, Ninguaria actually had something of a night life. Instead of a single night club, Porta di Vulcani had an entire street, almost large enough to be called a red light district.  
  
On some other occasion, he might have enjoyed sitting down with a few drinks and listening to even a mediocre singer, or found somewhere to play a few rounds of cards, or even have tried to find himself some company for the evening, preferably company that bore as little resemblance as possible to Francis Bonnefoy. Tonight, with two teenage girls and twelve-year-old in tow, Arthur steered them clear of the rowdier establishments.  
  
There was a restaurant near the edge of the harbor district that served reasonably good food, and where Lili and Xiao Chun would not be the only remotely respectable women in the place.  
  
"…I gave him the wrong one," Lili was saying to Xiao Chun, "but he won't switch them with me, even though it's too small and I put on all those ruffles."  
  
Ruffles?  
  
Peter had run ahead of them, losing interest in the conversation.  
  
"If you fall," Arthur called to him, “you're washing the mud off your trousers yourself."  
  
"I bet Lili would do it for me, since she's not a jerk."  
  
Arthur saw movement out of the corner of his eye, heard something – maybe fabric rustling, maybe a footstep, he was never sure afterwards – but he was tired, and his attention was on his crew, and by the time he was turning, one hand going to his gun, two men had already seized Peter and dragged him into the shadows of a narrow alley.  
  
"Get off! Let go! I'll make you sorry!" Peter shouted, struggling desperately as Arthur lunged for the men who held him.  
  
Someone else grabbed him from behind, and he saw metal glinting in the dim light just before a hard blow struck him in the side.  
  
'I really need to teach Alfred not to ill wish people,' he thought, as the blade went in. Especially not in places where magic was being worked. If he kept it up, he'd eventually get someone he cared about hurt.  
  
For moment, there was no pain, and he could clearly hear Peter yelling "Bastards!" as one of the attackers let out a surprised yelp, saw Lili drawing her gun and the flash of a blade in Xiao Chun's hand, and then the man holding him yanked the knife back out and fire seared through his side.  
  
His knees went weak, and for a moment, only the hand on his arm kept him upright.  
  
Arthur instinctively pressed a hand to his side, where his shirt was already wet with blood.  
  
One of the girls yelped, and his brain started working properly again. He reached for his attacker's face with his bloody hand, not bothering with an elaborate spell.   
  
With his own blood freshly spilled, he didn't need to.  
  
Green light flared, and the man dropped to his knees, both hands clutching his face as he keened in pain.  
  
Two more of the attackers were on the ground, but only one was dead, and the other was already getting up. "Run," Arthur choked out. There were more, looming up out of the shadows of the alley; he couldn't tell how many.  
  
They should have left Peter behind on the ship.  
  
He staggered forward, following his own order. His knees didn't want to work properly, and every breath pulled agonizingly at his side.  
  
Lili and Peter took off down the street without looking back. Xiao Chun, on the other hand—  
  
Arthur grabbed her by the wrist before she could throw the explosive. "Don't," he panted. "You'll draw the police and the harbor master." Not to mention everyone else within a half-mile radius. He should have realized she'd brought her toys with her when he'd seen her fiddling with her sleeve; she hadn't been twisting loose a button, she'd been adjusting her arsenal.  
  
Her eyes went to his hand, covered with blood that looked nearly black in the darkness, and she obeyed, tucking the homemade grenade back inside her sleeve.   
  
Once he started running, it was easier to keep going, especially when he heard the muffled thump of a silenced pistol behind them.  
  
Left at the next cross street would take them back toward the ship. Arthur started to turn, gesturing at the others to follow, only to be brought up short by Xiao Chun's hand on his elbow.  
  
"No," she said. "My sister's is closer."  
  
Of course it was. Lovely.  
  
At least Yao would presumably be as unhappy to see him as he'd be to be treated by her.  
  
They were drawing level with Lili and Peter now; she must have slowed down in order to return fire, because Arthur wasn't running as fast as he should have been. Too much magic and not enough exercise, obviously – he was breathing embarrassingly hard.  
  
"Why are we running?" Peter panted, nearly skidding into Arthur as they all rounded a corner. "We could totally take those guys! Why didn't you just magic their guns into exploding?"  
  
It was cute that the boy had so much faith in his abilities. "Magic doesn't work that way," he told him.   
  
"But there were only six of them. This is stupid. We should-"  
  
"Shut up and run," Arthur snarled, foolishly turning to look at Peter as he said it.  
  
One of his feet caught on something, throwing him off balance. He tried to recover, and made it two out-of-control strides on sheer momentum before hitting the ground on his hands and knees.  
  
Pain shot through him at the impact, and for a moment, he just sprawled there, stunned.  
  
Then he took a deep breath – as deep as he could manage, anyway – and started to push himself back to his feet. The Thembrians were surely still following them, and Vash would use him for target practice if he let his little sister get hurt. And there was Xiao Chun. And Peter.  
  
He made it to his feet, staggered a few steps, and then, quite suddenly, found himself on his knees again.  
  
How deeply had that knife gone in?  
  
"Arthur?" A hand seized him by the arm, and he lifted his head to see Lili staring down at him. "Are you all-"  
  
"I'm fine." The words sounded breathy and weak, so he repeated himself, trying for firmness. "I'm fine."  
  
It must not have worked, because she still looked frightened. "You're-"  
  
"Help me up," he hissed at her. "We can't stay here."  
  
She said nothing, dropping to her knees beside him and pulling his arm across her shoulders. On his other side – the bad one – Xiao Chun did the same, and between the three of them, they somehow got him back on his feet.  
  
They didn't run after that, but they still reached their destination much faster than Arthur had expected.  
  
He leaned against the wall as Xiao Chun knocked on the clinic's door. In the dark, the red paint her sister had had applied to it looked black, and so did the shuttered windows.  
  
He was going to feel a complete fool if Yao wasn't in.  
  
He should have ignored Xiao Chun and made for the ship. Kiku and Vash had patched him up before, and—  
  
The door swung open, and Wang Yao stood silhouetted in the doorway, yellow light spilling out into the street from behind her. "I'm closed," she grumbled. "Didn't you see the—Xiao Chun? What are you doing here?"  
  
Xiao Chun nodded in Arthur's direction. "The captain was stabbed."  
  
"Stabbed?" Peter squeaked. He jerked around to stare at Arthur. "You let them stab you?"  
  
"He probably deserved it." Arthur couldn't see her face, not with the light behind her nearly blinding him, but she sounded unimpressed.  
  
Xiao Chun shuffled her feet for a moment, then pushed her hair out of her face and looked back up. "Look, can we just come inside for a while? We need to get off the streets for a bit."  
  
Yao stepped to the side, making room for her to pass. "My little sister is always welcome. Your little friends can come, too. He, on the other hand," she stabbed a finger in Arthur's direction, "isn't setting a foot in my clinic without paying."  
  
"They're my crew mates, sis, not my 'little friends.'"  
  
"How much?" Arthur gritted out. He'd had a good working relationship with Yao once; she'd sold him medical supplies for the  _Ariel_ , and stitched up Vash or Kiku a time or two after a raid had gone badly. In return, he'd paid her well, both in cash and with morphine, sulfa power, and vaccines imported from the mainland.  
  
Then he made the mistake of offering Xiao Chun a place on his crew. Yao had never forgiven him for that.  
  
"I'll decide that after I take a look at you," she said, and gestured for them all to come in.  
  
Pushing himself upright and stepping away from the wall wasn't too difficult, but the three steps up to Yao's doorway seemed to loom ridiculously high. Arthur waved off Lili's attempt to help and grabbed the wooden railing, using it to haul himself up to the narrow porch. He managed to make it inside under his own power, too, and felt a brief moment of relief when Peter scampered in after him and closed the door.  
  
They were off the street. And he hadn't passed out on Yao's porch.  
  
She would probably have found a way to charge him for that, too.  
  
"Put him over there." Yao nodded toward the examination table, and went to the sink in the corner of the room. "Try not to bleed on anything," she added, as she started to wash her hands.  
  
If he'd felt better, Arthur would have tried to come up with a fitting response. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and hoisted himself up onto the examination table, wincing as the effort tore at his side.  
  
Taking his coat and shirt off was hardly any less painful, and he winced again at seeing how much blood had already soaked through both shirt and undershirt.  
  
"That's going to need stitches," Yao said, before she'd even laid a finger on him.  
  
"He's not going to die, is he?" Peter asked. He'd gone pale when Arthur had taken his coat off, and was hanging back against the wall when he usually would have been crowding forward.  
  
"Of course not," Arthur told him, just as Yao said,  
  
"Not now that I'm treating him." Then, to Arthur, "They missed your kidney, or you would never have made it here, but I don't like all this blood." She set one hand against the slash in his side and pressed, hard, muttering something, and the flow of blood halted for a moment, just long enough to allow her to wipe the wound clean and inspect the edges. "This needs to be irrigated. Xiao Chun, get me the sulfa, and a suture kit."  
  
"I assume anesthetics cost extra?" Arthur said, trying for dryness and probably succeeding only in sounding tired.  
  
"For you?" Yao smiled at him. "Always."  
  
The alcohol she poured into the wound burned worse than the initial injury had, and for a moment, he couldn't breathe.  
  
Then someone shot in one of the front windows.  
  
Wang Yao was a small woman, an inch or two shy even of her sister's slight height, but she was strong. Arthur was still frozen in pain, unsure whether the gunshot he'd just heard had actually happened or was all inside his head, when she physically dragged him off the exam table and onto the floor.  
  
"You led them here," she snarled, as she pressed a handful of gauze to his side, which had started bleeding again the moment she took her hands away. "How could you lead them here! What trouble are you dragging my little sister into now?"  
  
Lili's rifle fired, the report louder and deeper than the Thembrian's weapons. "Got one," she exclaimed, loudly enough that Arthur heard it even over the ringing in his ears. Once again, he found himself glad that Vash was a paranoid bastard who'd trained his little sister to be a sharpshooter.   
  
"We'll go out the back," he panted. "Xiao Chun, get Peter out."  
  
Something sailed through the now-glassless window and Arthur had just a moment to take in the shape of a dark bottle and the trail of flame from the burning rag stuffed in its throat before it landed on the floorboards in front of him.  
  


* * *

  
  
The floor was bare, unvarnished wood, uneven where the floorboards had warped.  The window was stuck fast, wood swollen and paint stuck together in the humidity, and Alfred hadn't been able to get it to budge.  He'd been tempted to get their tools out and force it open, but if he'd broken it, they would have to pay extra.  
  
If they could afford to pay extra, they could have rented a nicer room.  
  
"It's not that bad," Matthew said, for the second time.  "At least the windows have screens."  
  
"What good does that do?  We can't even open them."  
  
"Maybe we should have stayed on the  _Ariel_.  Free lodging's the least Arthur owes us."  
  
"If we'd stayed there any longer, I'd have taken a swing at him."  
  
"Maybe we should have stayed on the  _Ariel_ ," Matthew repeated.  
  
Alfred turned to look at his brother, whose face was serenely innocent.  Until he started to snicker.  
  
None of this ridiculous situation was actually funny, but Alfred found himself joining in anyway.  There was no use moping about it.  
  
Repairs on the Sea Eagle were still only half completed – there had been more damaged then they had first thought – and that meant at least another full day of smiling and making nice with Arthur's crew.  Their bank account had gone from nicely full to nearly empty after handing their fee back over to Captain Arlovskaya, half the Thembrians in town apparently wanted to pound their faces in, they'd failed on the most lucrative commission they'd ever had, and they were stuck eating dinner in a cheap, rented room because staying anywhere half decent would have been too expensive.  
  
On the other hand, they hadn't been attacked in any more alleys, the Sea Eagle  _was_  repairable, and reputation or no reputation, if Arthur had actually given the statue back, they'd have had to deliver it to Arlovskaya, and now that the bruises on his face had had time to get really swollen and painful, Alfred didn't particularly feel like doing anything that would make the Thembrian officer happy.  
  
"We need another job," he said, after a few moments spent chewing on their sandwiches in silence.  "We should check with the harbor master to see if he has a list of commissions."  There was always the mail, but the next postal flight wasn't until next week.  And even a poorly paying job would get them off Ninguaria with money in their pockets.  
  
"Something that keeps us away from Antillia," Matthew put in.  "I don't want to see the 'Nordic Provisional Government in Exile's Air Force'" he sketched quotation marks in the air with his fingers, "again until I've had time to forget about patching all the holes in the Eagle's wing."  
  
Alfred made a face.  Two of the three states of the former Nordic Confederation – Hriedgotaland and Kvenland – had been a satellite of the Thuringrike for nearly ten years now, and Bjarmaland has been occupied by Thembrian forces for the past six.  Vanaimoinen and Oxenstierna's crew were supposedly part of a splinter group that wanted to regain their nations' independence, but they were closer to privateers than anything else.  
  
He'd sympathized with them anyway, stuck in the same situation half the archipelago feared would someday happen here, but that had been before Mathias Køhler had tried to shoot them out of the sky.  
  
"Do you think Sergeyevich knew they were going to come after us?" he asked.  Valuable and powerful as Arthur swore the creepy little statue was, shipping it to Arlovskaya could still have waited twenty-four hours until the storm had passed.  And Oxenstierna wasn't usually a reckless captain.  But if he'd known what they were carrying…  
  
This whole thing was a completely ridiculous amount of fuss over a little magic.  
  
Matthew nodded.  "They must have-"  he broke off abruptly as a loud rattle of gun fire sounded from outside, clearly audible even through the closed window.  
  
Alfred was on his feet automatically, his sandwich spilling to the floor.  "That came from right outside."  
  
"We're six blocks away from the waterfront!" Matthew protested, running to the window to peer through the fly-specked glass. "People don't just shoot each other in the streets here.  It's barely even dark out!"  
  
His gun was in the bottom of his carpetbag.  Alfred knelt and pawed through it, tossing shirts, socks, and undershirts onto the floor until his fingers found the hard shape of the .45's barrel.  Where were his bullets?  Shit, shit, why didn't he keep it loaded?  
  
"I'm going to go see what's happening," he told Matthew, while he groped frantically though his bag for ammunition.  It probably took less than a second to find the cardboard box of bullets and start loading his gun, but it felt endless.  Someone out there might already be dead.   
  
He could hear more gunfire as he ran down the steps, Matthew thundering down the stairs behind him.  
  
When they reached the porch, Alfred looked both ways up and down the nearly empty street.  He couldn't tell which direction the noise was coming from – it seemed to echo off the buildings all around them.  
  
Then an orange tongue of flame wooshed out of a window a few blocks away.  
  
"Oh Hel," Matthew breathed.  "And now they're burning things down.  We need to call somebody.  The police-"  
  
"There might be people in there!" Alfred interrupted.  "Come on."  
  
The flames were crawling up the front wall of the building and spreading across the roof by the time they reached it.  A small cluster of men were standing in the street outside, staring at the fire like idiots.  "What are you doing?" Alfred demanded.  "There could be someone in there!"  
  
Then his brain caught up with his mouth and he saw the guns, and the bottles stuffed with rags.  
  
Oh.  That's what they were doing.  
  
He brought his own gun up, aiming it at the closest man, who had a homemade fire bomb ready to throw.  "Throw that, and I'll shoot you."  
  
"Put that toy away," another of the men said, aiming a submachine gun – a submachine gun! – at Alfred's chest.  "This doesn't concern you."  
  
He spoke with a heavy Thembrian accent, and Alfred's stomach hollowed out as he realized what that might mean.  
  
"You're right," Matthew blurted out.  "It doesn't concern us.  Not at all!  Sorry, sir. We'll be, ah, leaving now!"  He grabbed Alfred's arm, fingers digging painfully into his biceps, and started tugging him backwards.  
  
"What-  But they're-" Alfred spluttered, trying to pull away.  
  
"We'll go around the back," Matthew hissed into his ear.  "We can't help anyone if they shoot us."  
  
The building had no backdoor, just three windows set into the back wall, all high enough off the ground that Alfred had to stretch upwards in order to try and break one.  He handed his gun off to Matthew and started to aim an elbow at the glass, then had second thoughts.  If he broke the window and sent fresh oxygen rushing into the building, the fire could flare up.  But if he didn't--  this was the only way anyone inside would be able to get out without being shot down in the street.  
  
And there had to be people inside.  You didn't wait outside a burning building with military grade weapons unless you thought somebody was going to come out.  Or wanted to keep them from doing so.  
  
He slammed his elbow into the glass as hard as he could, and succeeded only in making his right arm go numb from the elbow down.  Alfred winced, shook his hand out, and then stepped back, balling it into a fist.  
  
It took two blows for the window to break.  He hoisted himself up, the edges of the glass cutting painfully into his palms, and called through the open window.  "Hold on, I'm coming."  
  
There was no fire in this part of the building yet, but the air was thick with smoke.  It was even hotter in here than it was outside.  "Hello?" he called, trying to stifle the urge to cough.  "Call out if you’re trapped."  
  
Matthew's head appeared in the window, and Alfred was turning to help pull him up when the door to the room slammed open, letting in a flood of smoke, heat, and sullen orange-red light.  
  
The silhouette framed in the doorway looked familiar, but Alfred didn't stop to think, just moved.  He grabbed for the person and pulled them toward the open window.   "Be careful," he said, as he shoved him toward it.  "There's broken glass."  
  
"Jones?"  The boy pulled back, goggling at him, and with a shock, Alfred recognized Xiao Chun – not a boy, then.  
  
"Go," he ordered.  "Matty's waiting outside."  
  
"My sister's in there," she said.  "And Peter and Lili.  Make sure they, you know-"  
  
"Go," he repeated.  "I've got them."  
  
She nodded, and went, avoiding the shards of glass studding the window frame with far more grace then he'd been able to.  
  
He turned, and Lili appeared out of the smoke, bent nearly double with coughing and dragging Peter by the arm.  "Mr. Jones-"  
  
"Where's Dr. Wang?" he interrupted.  
  
"Back there," she said, between coughs.  "With the Captain."  
  
Alfred swore, pushed her toward the window, and took a deep breath – the air would be worse in the other room.  
  
Then he ducked his head, pulled the collar of his jacket up, and went looking for Xiao Chun's sister.  
  
He found her halfway down the building's narrow hallway, supporting a semi-conscious Arthur.  
  
She said something to him, but he couldn't hear it over the crackle of the flames and the sudden, dull echo in his ears.  
  
"I'll take him," he said, coughing as the heat in the air seared his throat.  "The others are outside with my brother.  He's got a gun, in case the Thembrians come around to cut us off."  
  
"Thembrians?" she mouthed, the word barely voiced between coughs.  
  
Alfred didn't answer.  Instead, he moved to Arthur's other side and ducked under the other man's arm, taking his weight from Dr. Wang.  He tried to tell her where to go, and ended up just coughing, so instead he simply raised an arm and pointed.  
  
Arthur was shirtless, his green coat draped over his bare shoulders, and blood was oozing from a long gash across his ribs.  Alfred tried to wrap an arm around his ribs without touching it, but it was no good – it smeared under his fingers and soaked into the cuff of his sleeve.  He remembered thinking that it would serve Arthur right to run into angry Thembrians in a dark alley, and winced.  
  
He'd been picturing bruises and a bloody nose, not this.  
  
It didn't take them long to get outside, though maneuvering Arthur over the window ledge without dragging his naked chest over the broken glass was tricky.  Outside, Matthew and Lili were standing guard at each corner of the building, each with gun in hand, while Xiao Chun was holding Peter by the arm.  
  
The kid's face was pale, and he looked wide-eyed and scared and far too young to be running away from crazy mainlanders with guns.  
  
Had the Thembrians known he was inside the clinic? Had they known that the building was inhabited, what it was used for?  
  
A horrible thought struck him.  "You didn't have any patients inside, did you?" he asked, once he'd gotten his breath back.  
  
Dr. Wang shook her head.  "Only Mr. Eyebrows."  
  
Mr. Eyebrows.  He'd have to remember that one.  
  
Arthur stirred, coughing, and tried to pull away from him.  
  
"It's okay," Alfred told him.  "I saved you.  You're safe."  
  
Arthur blinked up at him, looking dazed and blank, and then his gaze sharpened and his eyes narrowed.  "You," he wheezed.  
  
"You're safe," he repeated.  "We got everyone out."  
  
"Not safe."  Arthur fisted a hand in Alfred's shirt front – whether to try and tug him closer, or to hold himself up, Alfred wasn't sure.  "Have to get," a spasm of muffled coughing, "back to the Ariel."  
  
"How?' Matthew cut in.  "There's three men with guns on the other side of the building, and they're between us and the harbor."  
  
"Leave that to me, gentlemen," Dr. Wang said.  "I've lived here for six years.  It will take longer, but I can get you down to the harbor without being seen."  
  
"Keep us on unlit streets.  Shadows are useful."  Arthur raised one bloody hand, and drew some sort of symbol in the air.  Alfred's eyes were still stinging from the smoke, but he thought he saw the air around his fingers blur and shimmer.  
  
Then Arthur sagged back against him, eyes closing for a moment, and Dr. Wang swore in her own language, the words oddly musical-sounding.  
  
"That was foolish."  
  
"Blood is… useful, too."  
  
"Captain, please, let's just go," Lili interrupted.  "I only have two bullets left."  
  
Dr. Wang and Xiao Chun led the way, Matthew flanking them with Alfred's gun, and Lili took up the rear without being told.  Peter stuck himself to Arthur's side like a miniature guard dog, fists up and eyes glued to the shadows around them.  
  
"I ought to leave you here," Alfred told Arthur, as he helped him down the alley, following Dr. Wang's lead.  "You practically asked for this."  
  
"I'm sorry, all right, Alfred?" he muttered, sounding more tired than truly apologetic.  "I'll buy you a new ugly statue."  
  
"Don't bother," Alfred said.  "The bastards can keep their transport fee and rot.  I wouldn't deliver it to them now if you paid me."  
  


* * *

  
  
He wouldn't have made it back to the ship without Alfred's support.  It galled to admit it, but between the pain in his side, the cold, faintly nauseous dizziness, and the concealment spell he'd kept in place the entire time, Arthur was on the verge of collapse by the time they reached the harbor and saw the dark silhouettes of three airships looming against the sky.  
  
Even in the dark, he recognized the  _Ariel_  immediately – the wards encircling its gas bag and gondola glowed brighter than those on the other ships, and with the familiar greenish light of his own magic.  
  
Just seeing it seemed to make the dizziness worse.  He'd thrown far too much magic around tonight, forcing spells to work without a circle or a ritual by dint of throwing sheer, raw power into them.  Without it, he and Wang Yao would never have made it out of the clinic; if there was one thing Arthur could do instinctively, after years spent on airships, it was cast an anti-combustion ward.  He'd thrown one up in front of himself and Yao at the same instant that the home-made gasoline bomb had hit the floor and exploded, holding an image of the necessary symbols in his head for just long enough for her to haul him back from the flames.  
  
It had likely saved them both from second-degree burns, certainly saved their clothes and hair from catching on fire, but now he could feel the exhaustion and drain of power in his bones.  
  
The harbor was dark, the solitary streetlight that usually illuminated the docks unlit.  
  
It had been on when they'd left.  
  
"Why is it so dark?" Peter demanded.  
  
"Quiet," Matthew hissed.  
  
For once, Peter actually listened, staying silent as they limped their way down the dock toward the  _Ariel's_ mooring post.  
  
There were men next to it – the dark shapes of several bodies lay crumpled on the ground, and someone was kneeling next to one of them.  
  
He recognized Kiku mostly by his size.  
  
Arthur jerked his arm free from Alfred's grasp and started to run, swearing.  He made it two steps before his knees buckled, and Alfred grabbed him again, saving him from landing face-first on the wooden pier.  
  
Peter and Lili raced past him, their feet thundering on the boards, and Kiku's head came up.  "Lili, I don't think you should-" he began.  
  
"Vash!" she shrieked, flinging herself down next to Kiku.  "What happened?  Let me see!"  
  
Vash was lying flat on his back on the pier, eyes closed and face twisted in pain.  Kiku had both hands pressed against his stomach, and a dark, glistening stain spread out from around them, turning the green fabric of Vash's jacket black.  
  
They had come here, too.  While Arthur had been getting into fights in alleys, men had been attacking his ship.  He should have left another crew member on guard with them, made Lili or Xiao Chun stay.  
  
"We tried to stop them," Kiku was saying to Lili.  "You're brother and I took care of at least three of them, but then-" he broke off, looking past her and noticing the rest of them for the first time. "Dr. Wang!"  Kiku made as if to rise, then seemed to remember what he was doing and stopped, leaning his weight onto his hands again.  "How did you know-  Never mind, it doesn't matter.  The Thembrians shot him.  I think the bullet's still inside, but I don't know if it matters.  I can't get him to stop bleeding."  
  
Two of Vash's guns were lying discarded on the pier beside him, and Kiku's sword was abandoned some distance away, still wet with someone's blood.  Only two bodies other than Vash's lay on the pier, but something dark bobbed in the water just below them.  There had been at least six men in the group who'd attacked Arthur; the Thembrians must have sent their consulate's entire guard out after them.  That plus firing Yao's clinic said that they were taking this seriously enough that they didn't care how much attention they drew, or about how the Archipelago's governor might react.  
  
If Arthur hadn't already suspected that they knew exactly what that statue might be capable of, this would have confirmed it.  
  
Yao unslung her black leather bag from over her shoulder and knelt next to him, shouldering Lili out of the way.  "Stop crying, please,” she told her.  "You're in my light."  
  
Matthew – Arthur had almost forgotten about him –moved forward and took Lili by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet and pulling her back out of the way.  
  
He could feel the faint pulse of magic as Yao worked the same spell she'd used on him to halt Vash's bleeding.  "We need to get him back onto your ship," she said, sounding calmer than she had since the first round of gunfire had sounded outside her clinic.  "I can't deal with this out here; I need light and a clean place to operate on him."  
  
"But you can fix it, right?"  Lili asked.  She was clinging to Matthew's arm with both hands, her eyes fixed on her brother.  Her fingers were dark with blood – Arthur wasn't sure if it was Vash's, or his own.  "He's not going to die, is he?"  
  
"Of course not.  I'm very good at what I do."  
  
"I'll carry him up," Alfred said, releasing his death-grip on Arthur's arm.  "I don't think there's any other way to get him up the rope ladder."  
  
Yao nodded.  "Be careful.  And be fast.  I can only stop the bleeding as long as I'm touching him.  As soon as I remove my hands, it's going to start again."  
  
Arthur half expected Vash to protest – he didn't trust Alfred even at the best of time – but all he did was flinch and make a faint moaning sound as Alfred lifted him into his arms.  Was he even conscious enough to understand what was happening?  
  
He hoped not.  The only way Alfred was going to get him up that ladder was by slinging Vash's weight over his shoulder, which would put pressure directly on the gunshot wound.  
  
"They took the statue," Kiku blurted out, as Alfred started to climb, Vash's limp body over his shoulder and Yao following on his heels.  "I couldn't stop them or chase them down without leaving Vash.  I'm sorry."  He didn't even seem to notice Arthur's state of undress, or the smell of smoke that clung to all of them.  "You left the ship and cargo in my hands, and I lost it."  
  
Arthur laid a hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly.  "It's not your fault.  I should have stayed with the ship."  
  
"It's our fault."  Matthew was staring at his feet, looking as if he wanted to disappear.  "We told them where to find you."  
  
"You what?" Peter yelped. "You snitched on us?  You bastard, we helped you!  Now the Captain's hurt and Vash's gonna die and Xiao Chun's sister's place is burning down, and it's all your fault!  We should feed you both to the sharks."  
  
Xiao Chun cuffed him across the back of the head before Arthur could.  "Vash isn't going to die.  My sis will save him."  
  
"Get on the ship, brat," Alfred said.  His side still hurt, and the  _Ariel_ 's rope ladder had never looked longer.  
  
He let the kids go first, and then gritted his teeth and reach for the lowest rung.  
  
He wasn't quite sure afterward how he managed to climb the thing; by the time he reached the ship's gondola, Kiku was shoving at him from below, and someone had to grab his wrist to pull him inside, sending pain ripping across his side.  
  
"Go start the engines," he told Kiku, as he let the hand pull him to his feet and tried to blink the grey and yellow spots out of his vision.  "We're leaving before they come back.  Sorry, Yao."  Was she even here, or was she already seeing to Vash?  Either way, she wasn't going to like it.  
  
"Hey," Alfred's voice yelped, directly in Arthur's ear.  
  
Arthur flinched and jerked away, reflexively bringing one hand up and reaching for the dregs of his power.  
  
"All our stuff is back at the hotel," Alfred was whining.  
  
Arthur wanted to tell him to shut up, that it was all his fault anyway, but his ears had started ringing, and a cold, sick dizziness swept over him.  
  
"I said, all our – Arthur?  Arthur!"  
  
He didn't even feel himself hit the deck.


	4. Chapter 4

Arranging a flight from Ninguaria to Anatolia was not necessarily difficult, but convincing the pilot to cancel his previous flight, scheduled for tomorrow, and leave immediately, had taken both the threat of military detention and a hefty bribe.

Luckily, the man had been intimidated enough to believe her. Anatolia might be a satellite state of Thembria in all but name, but the Thembrian army still technically did not have the power to detain Anatolian citizens or charge them with crimes against the state.

Thanks to the gang of spectacularly incompetent thugs who passed for the consulate's guards, it was imperative that Natalia leave Ninguaria before the governor ordered the entire staff of the consulate to be detained for questioning, closed the port to Thembrian vessels, or otherwise delayed this whole already-over-schedule mission any further.

She had visions of the island's police force or harbor patrol stopping the Anatolian flying boat before take-off and searching its cargo, possibly seizing the Anostan statue to display in their antiquated little museum.

The general would have her head. Or, rather, he'd have Ivan's head. Her brother's attempts to shield the more unorthodox of his subordinates from official censure had not been without consequence, and the entire unit was on very thin political ice. Personally, she wasn't sure Poruchik Łukasiewicz or Podporuchik Laurinaitis had been worth the risk. 

Twenty-four hours ago, keeping the whole affair contained had seemed entirely feasible. "Eagle Transport" was to a receive a message on the inadvisability of failing to carry out commissions for Imperial Thembria, delivered by her subordinates' fists and indistinguishable from any of the half-dozen brawls that erupted in Porta di Vulcani's dockside bars every night, Kirkland and his crew would be quietly removed from the equation, and the statue would be recovered with a minimum of fuss, removing the need for anyone to know it had ever been stolen in the first place.

That was impossible now, but if there was one thing years in the Imperial Army taught you, however, it was how to make certain that when political inquiries took place, you didn't go down alone.

"The pirate Kirkland and his crew were to be quietly eliminated after reclaiming the statue," she reminded the five men who now stood nervously in front of her desk – originally the civilian official in charge of the consulate's desk, but effectively hers for the duration of her visit. Two of the men sported visible injuries, but a few magical burns and an arm in a sling were minor compared to the four dead soldiers littering the docks and alleys of Porta di Vulcani, or the two men who'd been injured severely enough to be confined to bed.

She missed Katushya. Her sister might be overly soft, but at least she could be relied on to carry out a simple order.

Even Laurinaitis would be hard pressed to fuck up more spectacularly. It should have been easy; all that would have been necessary was a bit of sabotage to Kirkland's airship, and they would have gone down in the ocean, leaving no bodies and no witnesses. Any risk that a magic worker aboard the airship might have realized the statue's value would have been eliminated. "Tell me, gentlemen," she asked, "what about last night would you define as quiet?" 

Several of the morons flinched with visible – and satisfying – fear. One of them, either braver or stupider than the rest, cleared his throat and spoke up. "We did recover the statue," he began, as if hoping that would get him and his comrades off the hook. "There was more resistance than we anticipated-" 

Natalia cut his off with a sharp wave of her hand. "Oh, you aren't going to have to explain it to me. You'll be explaining it to Podkolpovnik Braginsky."

The man's already pasty face paled even further. 

"That is," Natalia went on, "if the Ninguarians don't throw you in some mosquito-ridden jail cell. Thembria doesn't assassinate foreign nationals on neutral soil – the empire doesn't condone such brutal terrorist tactics. You acted on your own, and the consulate will be only too happy to hand you over to local officials if they ask." And since nearly a square block of the waterfront district was still smoldering, the local police would probably be on the consulate's doorstep as soon as one of the many witnesses of last night's disaster mentioned that he had heard the men who'd started the fire speaking Thembrian.

One of the men was still trying to sputter excuses when she dismissed them. Let the head of the consulate deal with cleaning up the rest of this mess; she meant to be long gone by nightfall.

She had barely a week to get the statue into General Winter's hands before the winter solstice, and the price for failure was one she preferred not to contemplate.

***

Without a soldering iron, a mask, and the ability to climb up on top of the Sea Eagle to work – not possible when the top surface of the wing and fuselage was stuck to a giant metal plate by what Alfred was firmly pretending was electromagnetism – there wasn't much he could do about the line of holes punched through the left wing and the gasoline tank inside it. So instead, he'd begun giving the Eagle its first annual engine overhaul several months early.

Figuring out how to drain the oil out of both engines when there was no place to set an oil pan underneath them had been a challenge, but creativity and ingenuity were the hallmarks of a good transport pilot and mechanic. Rigging up a way to suspend the pans under the Eagle's wings that wouldn't spill oil all over the place had taken a couple hours, but now the last remnants of black, used oil were slowly dripping into both pans, and it was time to really roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

When he dropped a socket wrench partway through trying to tighten one of the bolts on the inside of the left-hand engine mount, it came to rest about two feet below the catwalk he'd been standing on, as if it were lying on top of some invisible floor.

Alfred stared down over the edge of the Eagle's fuselage at where the wrench hung suspended in space. That… was a lot of magic. Did spells and wards just take power to set up and then run on their own, or was this stuff sucking energy away from Arthur all the time? 

Something about the latter idea was just creepy. And it didn't seem safe, not right now. Arthur had been stabbed and then practically set on fire last night, and still hadn't woken up after his dramatic collapse into Alfred's arms. Dr. Wong said he was sleeping, that he'd probably lost a good pint and a half of blood and worn himself out using magic without a circle or proper spells, but when Alfred had looked in on him before breakfast – Matthew had been worried, and anyway, it was only polite to check up on the people you'd saved –he hadn't looked asleep. He'd looked unconscious, his face pale and still smudged with soot, and all of him much too still. As a kid, Arthur had twitched and grimaced and ground his teeth in his sleep, and he'd usually slept curled on his side, not flat on his back with his arms at his sides like someone – probably Dr. Wong – had positioned them that way.

Maybe he could turn the magic floor off once he woke up.

Magic floor. Damn it, he'd spent an hour and a half setting up his suspended oil catch-pan masterpieces when he could have just set them down on the magic invisible floor.

Unless… maybe it only used Arthur's magic when things landed on it.

He probably ought to climb down and get his wrench back now.

Alfred finished checking over the engine mountings, cleaned grease and crusted on salt – it got on everything, nasty little corrosion-magnet that it was – out of all the little crevices he could reach without actually removing the engine block, and was about to check for oil leaks before pouring fresh oil back in when the door to the gondola opened, and Matthew climbed out onto the catwalk with him.

His brother had actually volunteered to help stand watch on the ship's bridge and man the controls, since Arthur and his gunner were both down for the count and Lili refused to leave her brother's side.

The polite thing to do would probably have been to offer his help as well, but Alfred hadn't been able to bring himself to do it. Rescuing them from the fire was the bare minimum a decent person would have done, and if the Thembrians came after them, he'd have no qualms about helping fight them off – Matthew was right, they should never have taken that commission – but actually helping crew a pirate ship was going too far.

Plus, the Eagle needed the maintenance, and standing watch on the bridge would just have been a lot of boring sitting around.

"Lunch is ready," Matthew said, without preamble. And then, while Alfred was putting his tools away, "Arthur woke up. I thought you'd want to know."

Alfred ignored the urge to go and check on Arthur immediately and maybe get a thank you for pulling him out of a burning building, and went to eat lunch. It was awkward and subdued, punctuated by Matthew's stilted attempts to make conversation with Kiku while Xiao Chun and Dr. Wong glared silently at one another. Even the little cabin boy was quiet, a shadow of his usual bratty self.

He was what, ten? Twelve? Only a few years older than he and Matthew had been when their father had adopted them. And Captain Arlovskaya's goons had been completely willing to shoot him full of bullets or burn him alive.

Alfred ate his fish and rice and drank his tea and told Matthew how work on the Eagle was coming, and tried not to feel guilty about telling Arlovskaya in detail exactly who had stolen her stupid cargo from him.

Vash was going to live, apparently. He hadn't been sure about that last night, when he'd carried the man up into the _Ariel_. Dr. Wong had been able to stop the bleeding that had soaked the shoulder of Alfred's leather jacket beyond repair, and that bag she'd dragged with her out of the burning clinic had turned out to be full of morphine, sulfa powder, sterile gauze, acupuncture needles, and a suturing kit. 

She'd used the kit on Arthur as well, presumably.

He stayed to help Kiku and Matthew clear away and wash the dishes – not because he felt guilty, it was just good manners – and then made his way back to the not-really-a-hanger to work on the Sea Eagle.

At least, that's what he'd intended to do. Halfway there, he'd found himself turning aside toward the crew quarters. He might as well get this out of the way.

Arthur didn't look awake, he thought. He was curled up on his side on the metal bunk, facing away from the door, with the sheet pulled up so far that only the back of a blond head was visible.

Alfred started to ease the door closed again.

"I know you're there. Just come in."

Right. Alfred stepped into the room, shut the door behind him, and turned to face the back of Arthur's head once again. He tried to think of the right thing to say, and drew a blank.

"I'm sorry," he blurted out, after a long, uncomfortable silence. "I didn't know they would come after you like that."

"What," Arthur said, "did you think was going to happen?"

Alfred cringing inwardly, feeling stupid and naïve and hating it. "I thought they'd go to the harbor patrol, or try to contact you to buy the statue back." And okay, maybe he'd suspected that it would be a little more serious than that, but he'd been angry, and Arthur had stolen from him and ruined his business and had deserved to be arrested or something.

But not to be gutted like a fish and burned alive. 

Arthur rolled on to his back, moving slowly and carefully, like it hurt. "I should have stayed onboard," he said, after a moment. "I knew they would want it back. I didn't expect…" he trailed off, then, "I thought we'd be safe in port, with so many witnesses around."

"They're nuts. They have to be. The governor is going to have the entire consulate shut down after last night."

Arthur actually smiled for a moment. "I doubt they care. You really have no idea how much that statue was worth, do you?"

About two blocks of residential neighborhood, and Eagle Transport's ability to take their next commission with a clear conscience. "Anyway," Alfred said, trying to fill the silence with words, "I just came to, um, say I was sorry. And that you can turn off the floor."

Arthur blinked at him, his eyebrows drawing together in almost comical confusion. "Turn off the… what?"

"The floor. You know, under the Sea Eagle. The magic one. " Alfred sketched out an imaginary flat surface with his hands. "You can turn it off if it's making you too tired." 

Light apparently dawned, because Arthur stopped looking baffled and frowned at him. "It's part of the same spell holding the plane in place – taking just part of it down would mean redoing the whole thing."

"Oh. Well, I just wanted to make sure. Anyway, I need to degrease the second engine and get everything put back together before we get to Antillia. You are going to let us off there, right? Because if you were planning to kidnap us, we're not just going to stay put quietly."

Arthur closed his eyes, letting his head drop back onto the pillow. "Why in the name of all the gods would I want to kidnap you?" he said tiredly. "Yes, you can leave."

"You tried to get us to leave Dad and run away with you." It had been, Hel, more than seven years ago now, when Arthur had first shown up in the Archipelago, as a crewmember on what Alfred suspected in retrospect had been some kind of smuggling ship. Why on earth Arthur had thought they'd want to leave the only parent they'd ever had in order to do scutwork on some creaking, leaking blue water ship, he'd never been sure.

It wasn't like he'd actually wanted to get to know them again, because he'd taken off almost immediately when they'd said no, and hadn't come back.

"I was probably drunk." Arthur's voice was flat, and he didn't open his eyes. His side was probably hurting, and Alfred would bet he'd made Yao save all the morphine for Vash. "Go away, Alfred. I'm too tired to listen to you babble."

Just this once, Alfred decided not to argue. He hadn't intended to stay for long anyway, and leaving the false intimacy dark, close little cabin was almost a relief.

***

After several weeks patrolling the North Sea, Feliciano had begun to dread the ship's alarm klaxon. Every time the sound blared through the ship's corridors, he jumped a foot and had to suppress the urge to find somewhere to hide.

It wasn't even that it signaled the beginning of an action and ordered everyone to battle stations – it was just so sudden and loud.

He heard running footsteps over the repetitive wailing just in time to press himself against the wall and avoid being run down by Gilbert – by Hauptmann Beilschmidt – who was sprinting down to corridor in the direction of the hanger bay. His coat was flapping unzipped, his leather flying helmet was on crooked, and he was holding one leather flying glove in his mouth while trying to put the other one on.

He nodded vaguely at Feliciano's salute as he ran past him, and the white scarf trailing from around his neck came unwound and slithered to the floor behind him.

Feliciano grabbed it up and help it out, but Gilbert was already past him and not looking back.

"You dropped your scarf," he called out, waving the scarf though the air like a flag to make sure Gilbert saw it.

Gilbert glanced back over his shoulder, spat out the leather glove – he managed to catch this bit of his flight gear instead of losing it – and called back, "How sunburned can I get in one flight?"

Feliciano shrugged, and shoved the scarf into his uniform pocket. Unlike most of the _Iron Cross_ 's crew, stewards and cooks didn't have an assigned station to go to during an action, other than "somewhere out of the way." He'd been on his way to the ship's tiny, windowless closet of a laundry room when the alarm sounded, and the efficient and soldierly thing to do would probably be to continue on his way and wash sheets and uniform shirts while the enemy shot at them. Or to go to the galley and help make sure everything there was secured, just in case the ship had to turn or lose altitude suddenly.

Sometimes it was very hard to be efficient and soldierly.

Surely no one could blame him for one small, little lapse, he decided, and turned around to head towards the ship's bridge, instead. He wasn't sure whether battles were less scary or more so when he could hear and see what was going on, but it was comforting to be near the captain. 

Ludwig was always so sure of himself, and of his command. He hadn't been on the _Iron Cross_ for very long, true, but he'd never once seen Ludwig hesitate or seem unsure of what to do, except for that first day when Feliciano had nearly fallen on top of him. He'd been self-possessed and solemn even as a child, despite Feliciano's best attempts to get him to stop being so serious, and he'd kept that gravity as an adult.

Watching him, it was easier to tell himself to take a deep breath and calm down and not panic; nothing had happened to them yet that Ludwig couldn't deal with.

Like everywhere on the _Iron Cross_ , the bridge was cramped – despite the looming mass of its gas bag, the airship's gondola contained no unused space. Feliciano flattened himself against the wall just inside the door. Ludwig hadn't ordered him off the bridge yet, probably because he didn't have anywhere else vital that he was supposed to be, but that didn't mean he wouldn't.

Last time, he'd noticed him hovering in the doorway, demanded to know what he was doing there, and then ordered him to run to the bomb bay and engine room with messages. He'd nodded approving at how quickly Feliciano had returned, and then had ignored him, tacitly allowing him to stay.

As always, everyone on the bridge was terribly efficient. The _Iron Cross_ had responded to a radio call from one of the Thuringrike's surface ships, and was preparing to bomb a cluster of Thembrian ships.

Their own ship was beneath them, hidden from view, but the two ships Feliciano could see, below and ahead of them, even he could recognize as a Thembrian destroyer and escort carrier – one lean and menacing, bristling with guns, and the other low and flat, its deck nothing but runway. They looked tiny, so far below them, like wooden toys, but even from four thousand feet, he could see that the little carrier's deck was empty of all but one or two planes.

He shuddered. Not just anti-aircraft guns – because he was certain those scary-looking guns currently firing away at the Thuringrike destroyer could swivel upward to shoot down airships – but fighter planes.

Gilbert had shot down three Thembrian airships; he'd described their destruction to Feliciano with relish, holding his hands out nearly at shoulder width to indicate the size of the fireball.

Maybe he'd been exaggerating. When the Thuringian passenger airship Thuringia II had crashed and burned five years ago in Odraburg, nearly half the passengers and crew had survived. Maybe if they were shot down, the gondola would land in the water, and they could bail out, and then the destroyer could pick them up.

"The hunting squadron has deployed, Captain," Roderich said crisply. "The _Markgraf_ says she's been hit badly and is leaking. They're requesting covering fire in order to disengage and retreat."

"Take us up another thousand feet, and bring us over the targets, Bootsman," Ludwig ordered the helmsman. "No torpedoes," he said to Roderich. "Tell ordinance to ready the high-explosive bombs."

How high could a warship's guns shoot? Four thousand feet didn't feel very high, though it was close to the _Iron Cross_ 's pressure height – over five thousand feet and the ship's gas cells would start to leak because of some complicated thing about air pressure that Roderich hadn't explained very well.

Without Roderich's radio headset or a good view out the bridge's windows, Feliciano couldn't really follow what was going on. Knowing that there were enemy airplanes flying around out there and one of their ships somewhere underneath him leaking and maybe sinking made him want desperately to go closer to the windows and look, but instead he just tried to stay back out of the way and not draw anyone's attention. 

'See,' he imagined telling Leutnant Werner. 'I _can_ learn discipline.'

No one else seemed scared at all, not even when one of the Thembrian warship's guns hit them and destroyed their wards. Feliciano was biting his knuckles and feeling tears prickle in his eyes at the thought of dying without ever seeing Lovino or his grandfather again when one of their bombs hit the destroyer, and it tipped sideways, a column of black smoke springing up from its deck.

One of their planes flew low over it, probably shooting at it, or maybe at people on the ship's deck. Then it flew away again, two other planes chasing it. He hoped all three of them were from the _Iron Cross_ 's hunting squadron, but they were too far away for him to tell.

They were winning now, right? Feliciano wasn't entirely sure – watching Ludwig didn't give many clues, because he always looked so serious no matter what was happening – but he started to relax a little anyway. 

Then Roderich stiffened in his chair and made a strange, choked sound.

They were going to be blown up. He tried desperately to remember the last time he'd burnt incense or offered a sacrifice to Apollo, or even prayed, and couldn't.

Ludwig turned toward Roderich, a disapproving frown on his face. Thuringians were probably supposed to die stoically without ever breaking discipline, Feliciano thought hysterically, or maybe while shouting "Hail, Thor," or something. Or maybe that was just the officers. Were enlisted men allowed to be scared?

Before Ludwig could scold him for being unprofessional in the face of death, Roderich said, in an odd, choked voice, "One of our ravens is down, Captain." His voice cracked halfway through the sentence, and he looked away, down at his equipment panel.

Feliciano's stomach twisted as he realized that one of the ship's pilots was probably dead. For an instant, he hoped it was Sadiq, then felt guilty for wishing death on anybody. But he'd barely spoken to the ship's third pilot, and couldn't imagine the ship without Elizaveta or Gilbert.

Ludwig's face lost its sternness, and he reached out as if to place a hand on Roderich's shoulder, then let it fall. "Your wife-" he started, only to let it trail off as Roderich silently shook his head.

Feliciano wasn't the only one staring at Ludwig now; the entire bridge had gone still and silent.

Ludwig's jaw tightened, and his face drained of color. One hand went to the carved Odin's knot he wore at the collar of his uniform, where most airship personnel would have worn a hammer or lightning bolt.

He reached for the radio mouthpiece, taking it from Roderich. "Put the aircrafts' frequency on the main speakers," he ordered, his voice emotionless; it would have sounded cold, but Feliciano remembered the boy who'd pretended it didn't matter when he'd fallen and hurt himself, and saw the tension in his shoulders. "I need to hear them." 

A crackle of static from the radio's speakers indicated that Roderich had done so, and Ludwig spoke into the hand-held microphone. "Raven Two, you are in command. Take your squadron and return to rendezvous with the ship."

Hearing it spoken aloud, Feliciano felt sick.

"Iron Cross, this is Raven Two." Elizaveta's voice. "I think I saw a chute, sir. We can't-"

"That is an order, Raven Two," Ludwig snapped, and tossed the mouthpieces back to Roderich. 

Feliciano must have made some sound, because Ludwig swung around then, and seemed to see him lurking there for the first time. 

"What are you doing here, airman?" he demanded harshly. "Get back to your quarters."

Feliciano nodded and fled, forgetting to salute.

***

Unlike their flight north, the trip back across the archipelago was painfully slow. The Ariel stayed low and crept along at a snail's pace, using as little of Arthur's magic as possible.

Alfred spent as much of the trip in the hanger as possible, working on his rudimentary engine overhaul and avoiding Arthur. It became substantially harder to do that on the second day, once Arthur was no longer confined to his bed, and eventually, when Antillia was a distant smudge on the horizon and the Sea Eagle's engines were back in one piece, facing the pirate again was unavoidable.

The holes in the top of the gas tank needed to be soldered, which meant detaching the top of the Eagle's wing from the metal plate that held it in place. Which meant magic, which meant Arthur.

Watching him climb slowly and stiffly onto the catwalk made Alfred feel faintly sick. It looked like it hurt, and he was tempted to say that they could stay on the Ariel a few more days, that the final repairs could wait. Arthur would probably get all stubborn and offended and refuse, though, so he told himself that once they left, Arthur wouldn't need to keep the spells in place on the Eagle and the makeshift hanger anymore, and that the sooner they took off, the better it would be for everyone.

"I'm going to keep it floating in place while you work, so finish up quickly. And don't fall off. I don't think you'd actually go through the hull, but- Maybe you should tie yourselves to the catwalk."

The obvious concern was almost insulting. If it was concern, and not just worry that they would damage his airship or somehow break the spell he was casting. "Don't worry. I never fall."

"I wasn't worried."

"Oh. Good. Because you don't have to be." Alfred tried a smile. Arthur didn't return it. 

"We're ready when you are," Matthew said, adjusting his goggles.

Arthur barely acknowledged him, nodding and making a "hm" sound before returning all his attention to the symbols he'd chalked onto the catwalk in front of him.

When he held his hands up and started to chant, the result was almost disappointing. You rarely saw wards actually being constructed or spells cast, or at least, Alfred rarely did, and it was the sort of thing that seemed like it should be accompanied by glowing lights and swirls of mystical smoke. Instead, the hair on the back of his arms prickled as the chalk symbols seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then the Sea Eagle silently detached itself from the metal plate it had been stuck to and sank several feet.

It came to a stop in midair and hung there suspended from nothing, the tips of its wings only a few feet away from the inner walls of the airship. The fact that Arthur had lifted it in here without banging it into any of the Ariel's rigid framework was impressive.

Hopefully, he could get it out again just as easily.

Alfred studied the Eagle for a moment, trying to decide the best way to climb on to her. It would be easiest if he and Matthew could both climb out onto the top of the left wing and tackle the job together, with one of them working the solder into the holes and the other holding the blowlamp, but the weight of both of them together might unbalance the plane.

He always had wanted to get a chance to wing-walk as a kid. Not that this was real wing-walking, since Arthur probably had a magic safety net underneath them just in case – unless he'd turned the invisible floor off to conserve power – but it would still look cool.

Too bad no one here had a camera.

He held out a hand to Matthew. "Here, give me the lamp. I'll climb out there and do it. You get out on top of the fuselage and spot me from underneath."

"If you drip hot lead onto me, I'll make you regret it forever," Matthew said, as he handed over the blowlamp.

It was kerosene-powered, because nobody used gas blowlamps onboard an airship, which meant the solder would take a little bit longer to melt, but Arthur would just have to tough it out. Not even for the other man's health could Alfred bring himself to do a half-assed repair job on his baby. He'd seen people patch holes in aircraft fuselages with a piece of bublegum and some duct tape, but those holes didn't penetrate through the gas tank, and he didn't trust that kind of patching method on something that was going to get wet.

Even this soldering job was technically half-assed, since they were patching the holes rather than replacing the whole gas tank and the damaged section of wing, but doing a complete, proper repair would have to wait until they were on the ground. This just needed to be able to get them there.

The way he was forced to half-crouch/half-lay across the wing made working difficult - the hot-metal smell and kerosene fumes were choking with his face this close to them, and it was probably at least mildly dangerous even with goggles on, but luckily, it didn't take too long before he was slowly dripping solder into the last of the holes.

He turned the blowlamp's flame down and extinguished it, then climbed carefully off the wing and back to the catwalk. Once the lead alloy had cooled, he and Matthew could check to see whether the patches were water tight or not. If they weren't, they'd have to do this again.

Or maybe, he decided, catching sight of Arthur's white-knuckled grip on the catwalks railing, they would just go with the bubble-gum-and-duct-tape method.

Matthew's feet thumped onto the catwalk behind him. "We're done. You can put her back now."

Arthur kept on staring fixedly at the air in front of him, as if Matthew hadn't spoken.

"We're finished now," Alfred said. "Faster than you expected, I know, but I'm just that good."

Arthur continued to ignore him. His face had gone pale, and Alfred could see a film of sweat on his forehead.

Was he going to pass out? Oh, crap. Visions of the Eagle plummeting downward and tearing directly through the Ariel's superstructure and skin filled his head. 

Alfred waved a hand in front of Arthur's eyes, unsure what would happen if he touched him while he was doing his magic thing. "Arthur. Captain Kirkland. Hey. Mr. Eyebrows. Are you all right?"

Arthur swallowed visibly, his eyes finally focusing on them. "Don't call me that. Didn't anyone ever teach you not to insult people who are doing you favors?"

He wasn't going to provoke Arthur while he was hurt, Alfred reminded himself. Even when he responded to concern by snapping and snarling like Alfred had personally offended him. "Sorry," he apologized. "I was just trying to get your attention. Thank you for the help; we couldn't have fixed the Eagle without you."

"I can't very well have your plane stuck in here indefinitely." The snarl was gone – now he just sounded indifferent.

He was being polite, Alfred reminded himself. He owed the man for exhausting himself for his and Matthew's benefit, as well as for the disaster in Porta di Vulcani. Technically, the original theft of their cargo and that fact that he'd saved Arthur from the fire probably balanced that out, but someone had to be the bigger person, and it wasn't likely to be Arthur while still had a row of stitches in his side.

Arthur raised his hands again, muttering unintelligibly under his breath, and the Sea Eagle shuddered, dipped – just far enough to make Alfred stomach lurch – and then rose upwards again. The clang when it made contact with the metal plate was loud enough to make Alfred wince.

"I just fixed that!" 

Matthew elbowed him, hard. 

Okay, that had probably sounds slightly ungrateful, but the last thing the Eagle's wings needed on top of the bullet holes and the patch job he'd just done was a bunch of dents. He'd put it up crooked, too – the engines and propeller blades were dangerously close to the edge of the metal girder Arthur had mounted that plate on.

Alfred rubbed his abused ribs and glared at his brother.

Arthur again appeared not to have heard him, or maybe he was ignoring him on purpose. He lowered his hands and sagged against the catwalk railing for a moment, then scuffed his foot across the chalk symbols he'd drawn. "Yes," he said. "Remind me again when you'll be ready to leave? We should reach Antillia by six o' clock."

He sounded like he couldn't wait to get rid of them. Alfred manfully restrained himself from pointing out that he wouldn't have them aboard if the _Ariel_ hadn't captured them in the first place. 

"We'll definitely be ready by then," Matthew said. "It's not like we have much to pack." They'd left half their things behind in the hotel room in Porta di Vulcani, including their shaving kit, both of Alfred's good pairs of trousers, and Matthew's flight jacket.

Luckily, the more expensive tools and navigation equipment had still been inside the Sea Eagle, guarded by Matthew's lucky stuffed bear, but that didn't make the loss any less inconvenient. They had been really nice trousers. And he'd lost his cufflinks and most of his shirts, too.

There was a moment's awkward silence, and then Matthew said, hesitantly, "You look tired." Which Arthur did, if by 'tired' you meant half-dead. "Maybe you should go lie down."

Arthur pushed away from the railing and drew himself up straight, then hunched back over slightly, favoring his injured side. "I'm fine. Just make sure you're ready to leave when we make port."

He limped back to the gondola, back stiff like an angry cat's.

"You shouldn't have told him to lie down," Alfred pointed out. 

"Yeah, I forgot how sulky he gets when he's tired. He's almost as bad as you."

"When do I sulk? I never sulk."

Matthew rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like "You've been sulking since Tuesday," but which couldn't actually be because that was completely untrue and would have required Alfred to punch him.

They saw no more of Arthur for the rest of the trip, and somehow, even though he was deliberately trying to leave the man alone in order to let him rest, Alfred found himself annoyed by his total absence. He didn't even come to say goodbye in person when they launched the Eagle and flew down to a thankfully gentle landing in Antillia's harbor, sending Kiku to see them off and working the spell to lower the Sea Eagle from the bridge.

Antillia was exactly as they had left it, except that the weather was better – still humid and hot, but the skies were a bright, cloudless blue, with no storm clouds in site.

It felt surreal, bringing the Sea Eagle to a landing in the harbor and tying up at the dock as if this were the end of a regular mail run. Except for their complete lack of cargo, everything could have been normal.

He couldn't even remember what he and Matthew had planned before they'd picked up the Thembrian commission. The conversation with Sergeyevich in Francis's restaurant felt like it had taken place much longer than four days ago, and not just because Alfred had spent the past 48 hours doing what would normally have been a week's worth of maintenance work on the Eagle.

He'd nearly been shot down, had his cargo stolen, been the next best thing to kidnapped by pirates, been beaten up, nearly gotten into a shoot-out, had run into a burning building, and had accidentally handed over someone who'd once been a friend to a Thembrian death squad. 

He was going to choose their next commission a lot more carefully.

***

The laundry room was tiny and cramped, almost all the available space taken up by the two big washing machines and their attached wringers. There was just barely enough floor space for Feliciano to sit down and close the door, and let the sound of the machines drown out all the other shipboard noise.

He sniffed and rubbed at his eyes, trying to make himself stop crying. His sinuses were clogged and his eyelashes were sticky with tears and this was silly. He had only really known Gilbert for two weeks. The pilot had been friendly to him, yes, but they hadn't been close, not really.

And yet, every time he'd managed to get himself under control, he remembered the look on Ludwig's face when he'd ordered him off the bridge, and Roderich's horrified gasp when he'd heard whatever it was he'd heard over the radio, and he thought about how he'd feel if his own brother were dead, and suddenly his breath started to hitch again.

He should write to Lovino. He hadn't sent word to either his brother or his grandfather since he'd first come onboard the _Iron Cross_. Lovino never wrote back, but grandfather always did, long letters filled with advice about securing promotions and making a name for himself and making himself popular with women that Feliciano was never quite brave enough to follow.

He didn't know what he would do if either of them died; they were the only family he had, except for Roderich and a few other cousins. He couldn't even remember his parents, or the villa where he and Lovino had lived before they died; just his grandfather's house by the sea, full of art and books and small luxuries that in retrospect had probably been smuggled goods, and with his grandfather's rifle and sword from the Thuringian War hung in a place of pride on the wall. To listen to Julius Vargas talk, you'd never know that Ionia had lost the war and become a part of the Thuringrike.

Feliciano hadn't seen his brother in two years, but he still missed him every day.

He couldn't imagine how Roderich felt, having to listen to his friend die. Or his cousin's wife – Elizaveta must be so upset. They'd been so nice to him, despite not having seen him in years, and now—

He sniffed again, and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief.

His fingers met a wad of fabric much too large to be a handkerchief, and then he remembered Gilbert's scarf. 

He pulled the long strip of silk out of his pocket, carefully smoothing out all the wrinkles – not that it did much good – and manfully fought back a fresh wave of tears.

It didn't seem real, that a man he'd spoken to only hours ago could be dead now. Feliciano had meant to give the scarf back the next time he saw him, or maybe just drop it off at the officers' quarters.

He couldn't do that now; they'd remove Gilbert's things, pack them away and give his storage locker and empty bunk to someone else. The officers all had their own bunks, rather than sleeping in shifts like the crew, but there wasn't enough space available on the _Iron Cross_ to let any of it go unused. 

They would ship the contents of his locker to his next of kin the next time they docked at a Thuringrike base. Or they would have, if his next of kin weren't already onboard the airship. Feliciano guessed they'd just give all of it to Ludwig and let him decide what to do with it.

He should take him the scarf. If it were Lovino's, Feliciano would want to have it.

The laundry would need to be taken out and run through the wringer in a few minutes, but that could wait. 

Feliciano splashed water on his face and left the noisy cocoon of the laundry room. The corridors were neither more crowded than usual nor unusually empty, and the distant hum of the engine sounded the same. He thought it felt colder than usual, the chill of the outside air seeping in through the metal walls of the gondola without the full complement of wards to stop it, but that could have been because he'd just come out of the warm humidity of the laundry room. It was one of the few places on the airship that was never cold, wards or no wards.

He felt a little nervous walking towards the captain's cabin – enlisted crew weren't supposed to linger around the officers' quarters with no clear reason for being there – and that nervousness only increased when he heard voices and saw that Ludwig's door was open.

Maybe he should come back later.

"I know you're upset, so I'm going to forgive this insubordination," Ludwig was saying stiffly.

"Upset? _I'm_ upset?" It was a woman's voice, obviously Elizaveta; Bella, the ship's medical officer, never yelled like that. "How could you order me back?" she demanded. "I saw a chute! I know I did. I could have-"

"You said you thought you saw a chute." Ludwig cut her off, his voice still quiet and even and much too formal. He sounded like he was debriefing a particularly disappointing subordinate and trying not to lose his temper in the process – it was a tone of voice Feliciano was extremely familiar with, and it was all wrong. He'd gone white as a sheet on the bridge. Feliciano had expected to find him mourning, maybe even weeping and sobbing his brother's name. "The anti-combustion and air pressure wards were down," Ludwig went on, still with that precise, emotionless calm, "and we couldn't risk losing another plane. You and Sadiq were needed to defend the ship."

Elizaveta's voice rose to a near shout. "He's your _brother,_ you heartless-- "

"I can't risk the entire ship for one man, regardless of who that man is."

"Gilbert would have done it for you," she said fiercely. 

"And that," Ludwig said, his voice cold, "is why I'm the captain of this vessel, and he will never command anything larger than a single hunting squadron." 

"No, he'll never command anything larger than a hunting squadron because you _left him to die_." She nearly shrieked the last bit, and Feliciano flinched.

He backed up a step, then hesitated, touching the scarf in his pocket again. He could just see part of Elizaveta's back through the open door; she was still wearing her flying gear, her hair a tangled mess. Ludwig was out of sight completely, and probably neither of them knew he was there. 

He really should go. He shouldn't be hearing this. 

"What would you have had me do, Elizaveta?" Ludwig sounded tired now, his voice raw for a moment as he said her name. "Even if I had lowered the airship to search for him, based on what you thought you saw in the middle of a dogfight, and we were lucky enough not to be shot down before we could deploy one of the boats, there would have been nothing to find. It's the North Sea a week from the winter solstice. No man could survive in that water for more than twenty or thirty minutes. By the time we would have found him-" he broke off, and Feliciano wasn't sure if it was because he was unable to continue or because Elizaveta had moved like she was going to hit him.

"You tell yourself that, Korvettenkapitän," she said, her voice low and furious. 

Feliciano barely moved aside in time to keep from being run down by her as she stormed out of captain's quarters and down the hallway, her face flushed with anger. She didn't even seem to see him, staring instead at the floor and rubbing at her eyes with one hand. Was she crying?

Of course she was. Anybody who'd been friends with Gilbert would be.

The _Iron Cross_ 's fighters weren't seaplanes, which meant that she and Sadiq wouldn't have been able to land and rescue their squadron leader even if they had spotted him in the water. The only way to rescue a man from the ocean was to bring the airship down to just above the water and deploy crewmen in an inflatable life boat, who could then pluck the stranded man from the water and help him climb the rope ladder up into the gondola, or have him hauled up into the airship with a harness like a package of supplies. It was an extremely dangerous maneuver even when the airship wasn't in the middle of a naval engagement and being shot at.

She would have had to listen to and watch her commander – and friend, because he knew Elizaveta and Roderich were friends with Gilbert even though all three of them had denied that – fall to his death, knowing there was nothing she could do to save him. Except ask Ludwig to take the airship down and rescue him, and he hadn't done that.

Feliciano swallowed hard, feeling a little sick.

Maybe it would be better to leave the captain alone right now.

He was turning to go when something came sailing out of the room's open door and struck the opposite wall of the corridor, then clattered to the floor. Feliciano jumped instinctively, then recognized Ludwig's Odin's knot talisman.

He edged closer and carefully picked it up; it was wooden, hand-carved by someone who had been a mediocre artist at best. Blocky, angular lines twisted around one another, mimicking the coils of a knot, with one or two tiny nicks imperfectly smoothed out from where the carver's knife had slipped. It was coated in dark varnish and polished smooth, and hung from a strip of grey ribbon. 

The stylized knot, he'd been told, symbolized the king of the Thuringian and Nordic gods. Most airship crew prayed to a thunder or storm god, if they prayed at all – Jupiter, Thor, Perun. Odin was a god of war, wisdom, and treachery, but not of storms.

His two ravens, who flew back and forth to his throne spying for him, had given the Thuringrike's air corps its symbol and nickname. And since he supposedly saw all with his single eye, he was the god Thuringian sorcerers invoked in wards for clear vision.

There was a muffled sound from Ludwig's room, and Feliciano looked up, still holding the talisman, to see Ludwig sitting at the room's tiny table, shoulders slumped and his face buried in his hands.

Feliciano cleared his throat awkwardly and knocked on the edge of the door frame, feeling like an intruder. "Sir? Captain? I was outside, and I found this, and think it's yours. Because it was right outside your room, and it looks just like the one you wear, and, um, I have something for you." He thrust both the Odin's knot and the scarf out in front of him, where Ludwig couldn't possibly miss seeing them.

Ludwig looked up, blinking, and just stared at him for a moment. His lashes were spiked together, and Feliciano realized with something almost like relief that he'd been crying just now. He wasn't heartless after all.

Of course he wasn't. Feliciano knew better than that, he reminded himself. But twelve years was a long time, and people could change.

"Airman Vargas?"

"It's Gilbert's. Hauptmann Beilschmidt's," he corrected himself. "He dropped it when he was running to his plane. I was… going to give it back to him, later." He took a small step forwards and extended the scarf toward Ludwig again, the crumpled white silk dangling from his hand like a sad little flag. "I thought, if it had been Lovino's, I'd want to have it."

Ludwig reached out and carefully took the scarf from him, his fingers not touching Feliciano's. He stared down at it for a moment, then curled his hand into a fist, crushing the silk. 

"He never remembered to cover up properly, even when we were children."

Feliciano nodded solemnly. "I remember," he said, even though he didn't, really. Gilbert had been too old to play with him much, and they had mostly ignored one another. Gilbert's white hair hadn't seemed unusual when they were children – Ludwig's had been nearly as fair back then, so blond that it was almost white, too. But it was unusual for a grown man, and his tinted flying goggles weren't standard issue like Feliciano had initially assumed. 

Apparently the creepy spells they'd cut into his eyelids had only fixed his vision, not made his eyes or skin any less light sensitive. 

Ludwig blinked, like he was trying not to cry. His knuckles had gone white around the scarf, and his mouth was the same tight line it had been on the bridge, when he'd ordered the rest of the airplanes to return to the ship.

He looked so alone, sitting all rigid like that and trying to pretend he wasn't hurting.

Impulsively, Feliciano leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Ludwig's broad shoulders; if anyone ever needed a hug, it was his captain.

He smelled like hair oil and the wool of his uniform jacket, and somehow _solid_. Even now, when Feliciano knew he was struggling to stay in control.

Ludwig's entire body went stiff.

There were probably regulations about hugging your commanding officer. 

Feliciano let go and took a polite and soldierly step back. Then, just to make sure Ludwig didn't think he'd moved away because he didn't _want_ to hug him, he reached out and gave the other man a small pat on the shoulder.

It felt awkward and unnatural, but it was probably more military.

"You're a good person," he said. Then added," Korvettenkapitän, sir," when he remembered that talking to officers was supposed to be punctuated by a lot of 'sir'ing. "I don't think Elizaveta meant any of those things she said to you; she's just upset. I'm sure you did the right thing to keep the rest of us safe. You always do."

Ludwig actually smiled a little, although his eyes stayed just as hollow. "You've been on this ship for two weeks, Airman."

"I can just tell," Feliciano said. He was terrible at reading the atmosphere, Lovino had always told him, but he was right about this.

Ludwig stared down at the scarf in his hand, not saying anything.

After a moment, Feliciano set the Odin's knot down on the edge of the table, saluted, and left.

***

Caves were supposed to be the same temperature all year round, cool in the summer and insulated in the winter, but the deeper one went into the tunnels underneath the Kholmagorsk base, the colder the air felt. It clung to Ivan like a damp shroud as he followed at the general's heels.

Most of his men didn't like the tunnels. They found everything about them 'creepy,' complaining endlessly about the great, creaking miner's cage that lowered men and machinery through the shaft cut from the sub-basement to the caverns below, the dim, flickering electric lights, and the constant dripping of water that could always be heard coming from somewhere.

Ivan had never been particularly bothered by them, but he did wish they weren't always so cold. Or at least that he'd remembered to wear his overcoat this time.

The limestone cave systems under Kholmagorsk had been used by the inhabitants for centuries – there was a shrine in one of the caves under the city to a god far older than Perun – but the section of caves under the base itself was deep enough that they had lain untouched until military engineers had dug a shaft down to them and squared off the irregular natural caverns into usable tunnels with reasonably flat floors. They had originally been intended to serve as bomb shelters and storage space, and large sections of them still were, but the priests and mages had gotten one look at Kholmagorsk’s 'basement' and practically salivated.

There were forms of magic that were far more powerful when worked in a place the sun had never touched.

The place's potential had been underused before the war began, but General Winter was a practical man and gifted with enough foresight to take advantage of such a resource. And the general had always had an interest in magic; there were rumors that he had nearly entered the priesthood as a young man, before enrolling in the Imperial War College.

Several hundred feet down the corridor, the tunnel widened out into a large cavern, its ceiling high enough that the natural rock formations hanging from the ceiling had been left in place. They folded and dripped down from the ceiling like wax that had melted and then congealed.

Below them, two banks of radio and electronic equipment formed a rough 'L' shape. Thembria was a modern nation now, no longer mired in backwards superstition, and magic was worked alongside science. Once the circle of imperial sorcerers opened up the portal the general planned to create, the equipment would detect and measure the phenomenon across the electromagnetic spectrum. The power they would access through it would be analyses and studied, and the state of the portal itself constantly monitored.

The six sorcerers came to attention and saluted as the general strode in, his boot heels loud on the stone floor. He was a powerful, commanding figure, taller even than Ivan, who at well over six feet was usually the tallest man in the room.

Captain von Bock stepped away from one of the banks of equipment and saluted, not quite as crisply as the sorcerers had. Ivan would have to speak to him about that later. 

"Everything is prepared, general, sir." Von Bock gestured to the tall Faraday cage that had been set up to contain the portal, and the frightened looking men who waited inside it. "The sorcerers have finished setting up, and the sacrifices are ready. And Dr. Mogilevsky and the other scientists have everything calibrated correctly now." He had expressed open skepticism about the project when Ivan had assigned him to it, but either his opinion had changed in the past few weeks, or he was clever enough not to show his doubts about the general's brainchild. 

"You may begin, gentlemen," General Winter said, to the room at large. It was phrased politely, but was still very clearly an order. He turned to Ivan. "Pay attention, Podpolkovnik Braginsky. You are about to see the birth of a new era of Thembrian power."

Ivan straightened his shoulders, feeling a moment's satisfaction as the general addressed him almost as an equal. Natalia had done well, despite how close she had come to missing the deadline the sorcerers had set. There had been trouble with the locals, but the general had been pleased enough at finally having the statue in his hands to overlook it.

It was suspended in a copper frame at the center of the Faraday cage now, ready for the sorcerers to tap into its power.

If the general's advisors were right, the little stone figurine was more than just a relic of a long-dead civilization. Though Ivan himself couldn't feel any difference – all magic made the hair on the backs of his arms stand up, and the ancient Anostan statue was no exception – the power trapped in the stone was something other than ordinary magic, not from blood, or the gods, or human will, but something _other_. Something powerful enough to cause the great volcanic cataclysm that had destroyed ancient Anostus and left behind the many small islands of the modern Southern Archipelago in its place.

The Anostans, lacking the benefit of modern magical and scientific knowledge, had been unable to control it. According to legend, they had been decadent and weak, and had turned away from the gods to worship great monsters from the deep, and the earth itself had struck them down. Legends were for superstitious peasants.

Ionian, Troian, and Arzawan historical accounts pointed to something entirely different, and so did the evidence from recent archeological expeditions both in ancient Ionian sites and in the Archipelago itself. 

Von Bock fell into place just behind and slightly to one side of Ivan, as they followed the general to a small rise in the cavern floor that gave a good view of the equipment and ritual circle while being just far enough away from it to hopefully be out of the range of any accidental explosions. Mixing magic and electrical equipment did not always go smoothly. One day, Thembrian science would be able to harness magic properly, but for now, monitoring it and measuring it was the best that could be done.

The scientists must have been watching to see when the general reached the proper vantage point, because only moments after Ivan and von Bock had taken their places beside him on the raised section of floor, the drone of the generators increased, and the radio equipment began emitting a low hum of white noise.

The sorcerers arranged themselves in an evenly spaced circle around the perimeter of the Faraday cage, moving almost in unison. They began to chant in ancient Anostan, and after a few moments, the background noise from the generators seemed to mute, and the damp stone smell of the caverns changed. 

Ivan had expected ozone, or possibly smoke and sulfur, but instead, the brine smell of the sea seeped into the room.

For several endless minutes, nothing else happened. Then the stone statue began to glow with a dull violet light so dark it was nearly black. The white faces of the prisoners shackled to the floor around it bleached even further, their pale grey clothing taking on an odd, blue-violet glow.

The six men would normally have been sent to labor camps in the northern wastes. If anything, this was a milder sentence; while not technically a death sentence, life expectancy in the labor camps was short enough that many didn't survive to see the end of their sentences. And for these six, who by their lack of a thief's tattoos were probably political dissidents, the sentence would have been for life.

Instead, their deaths would serve the Thembrian people as they probably never would have in life.

The glow surrounding the statue began to pulsate, and when he squinted at it, Ivan could almost swear he saw the little carved tentacles writhing. Flickers of light were crawling over the inside of the cage now.

Abruptly, one of the prisoners broke. He yanked violently at his restraints, mouth open and the cords in his neck standing out as he screamed soundlessly. The cuffs and chain struck the stone floor in equal silence, again and again.

Beside Ivan, von Bock pulled off his glasses and looked away.

There was a great peal of noise so loud that Ivan felt it in his chest as much as he did his ears. The stone under his feet vibrated like a tuning fork, and for a moment, he felt an almost overpowering wave of nausea. He swallowed hard, willing it away.

As one, the men inside the cage collapsed.

He had expected a bright flash of light, but instead, the bulbs strung overhead actually seemed to dim as the air directly over the statue ripped apart like paper, purple-black light streaming through the tear.

The lights on the bank of radio and electronic equipment nearest to the Faraday Cage flickered and died.

From the corner of his eye, Ivan could see the general smiling.

He drew in a deep breath that tasted like salt, and smiled himself.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (or, “our procrastinating-from-actually-writing research, let us show you it!”)
> 
> Thuringrike military ranks (like ‘bootsman’) are taken from the WWI-era Imperial German Navy. Thembrian ranks (like ‘podpolkovnik’ and ‘poruchick’) are from the Tsarist Russian military. In the American navy, the helmsman on a rigid airship (like the _USS Akron_ upon which the _Iron Cross_ is based) would have been a quartermaster or boatswain’s mate, hence our decision that the Thuringian equivalent would hold the petty officer rank of ‘bootsman.’
> 
> The kerosene blowlamp Arthur and Matthew use to patch the Sea Eagle’s wing looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blowtorch.jpg and is a predecessor to the modern blowtorch.
> 
> The Thembrian city of “Kholmagorsk” is named after the city of Kola (the oldest city in Murmansk Oblast – Murmansk having been the site of a major naval base since the Soviet era) and the city of Kholmogory in Arkhangelsk Oblast (the town that prior to the construction of the port of Arkhangelsk was one of the largest trading centers in north-eastern Russia). The networks of caves underneath it, however, are based on the caverns underneath the Hungarian city of Budapest.
> 
> Dr. Mogilevsky is the name given to the real Soviet scientist Grigory Mairanovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mairanovsky) in V. Bobrenov’s roman a clef _Doktor Smert', ili Varsonof'evskie prizraki_ (“Doctor Death, or The Ghosts of Varsonofyevsky Lane”), an expose of the NKVD/MGB/KGB Laboratory no. 1/"Kamera" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_laboratory_of_the_Soviet_secret_services), a poison lab that performed human experimentation on political prisoners. We figured using the actual name of a real life performed-horrible-human-rights-violating-experiments scientist in our goofy airship pirates  & zombies AU might be in slightly bad taste.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content note:** Thembrian state security uses what the American CIA like to euphemistically call 'enhanced interrogation tactics.' (warning for very mild torture sequence)

Water was pooling on the floor of the corridor outside his door – a shallow puddle that grew wider as he stared down at it, seeping up from between the deck plates.

He hated it when the _Ariel_ leaked. He should make Peter mop it up; the discipline would be good for him.

At his age, Arthur had been doing things a lot less pleasant than mopping up a little water when the ship sprang a seam.

The water grew deeper as he walked toward the bridge, until he was wading practically ankle-deep in it. It was bitingly cold, stabbing through the bones in his ankles and numbing his toes until he barely felt it when he stumbled and banged one against the edge of the bridge's doorframe.

The _Ariel's_ bridge was empty, because he was the last one left. Someone had to make sure she stayed in one piece when the sea swallowed her, which wouldn't be long now. The more water she took on, the lower she sank, and eventually, the gas bag wouldn't be able to keep her in the air any longer.

Ahead, through the bridge's windows, Arthur could see the islands erupting – not with fire and ash, the way the archipelago's volcanoes usually did, but with steam and water and lava that glowed purple-black. The sky overhead was black, and lines of purple light rippled and shifted over the _Ariel's_ instrument panel as if filtered through water.

If he kept her in one piece, it would take longer for the sea creatures to find their way inside. There were worm-like things in the abyss that lived their entire lives without ever seeing light, and Kiku wouldn't like having them bore into in his bones and nest there. He liked things to be tidy and clean.

The water was halfway up his calves now, still achingly cold, and the _Ariel's_ controls were slimy under his hands.

There was a roar of sound so loud that he could feel it vibrating in his chest and inside his teeth as the volcano ahead ripped itself apart into a great cloud of black smoke. The floor under his feet tilted forwards, and Arthur found himself staring down at the ocean below as black water rushed toward him.

The waves rushed back, higher and higher until they towered above him, and Arthur could see the ocean floor, impossibly far below, full of slime and wriggling things that crept away from the light.

As he stared, a long gash ripped open between the wet, black rocks, oozing the same lurid, purple-black lava as the volcanoes. No, not lava. Magic.

It was magic, somehow given solid form.

And then long, dripping tentacles of it groped blindly upward from the abyss, reaching toward him, and Arthur screamed and screamed voicelessly, no sound emerging from his throat no matter how hard he tried, and then woke up.

He opened his eyes to blackness, and for a hysterical half-second thought that the crack in the ocean floor had swallowed him before his senses registered the blanket tangled around him and the ache of his half-healed knife wound. 

Arthur pressed one hand to his side in readiness for the pain he knew it was going to cause and sat up. The distant vibration of the _Ariel's_ engines was reassuringly unchanged.

A dream. It had only been a dream. Probably brought on by the stress of his injury – of the entire past bloody week – or the whisky he'd drunk before going to sleep.

He knew it was just the quiet of the dog-watches and the whistle of air from outside the gondola's hull, but it felt as if he could still hear the explosions ringing in his ears.

Arthur drew in a deep breath, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. He wasn't going to fall asleep again in a hurry.

What time was it? He groped for the watch he'd tucked under his pillow – even years after leaving blue water vessels, he still habitually avoided leaving anything remotely breakable lying around on tables or shelves – and squinted at the dim, green glow of the watch hands. A little after four in the morning.

Too early to take over the bridge from Kiku. If he went up there now, his first mate would politely suggest that he go back to bed.

Still, the thought of simply lying here staring at the ceiling was unappealing.

It took a moment to disentangle himself from his sweaty, twisted bedding, and another to find his slippers. Reaching under the bed for them still made the stitches in his side pull, but it didn't hurt quite as badly as it had a few days ago. He'd barely been injured compared to Vash, who would be laid up in bed for weeks yet if Lili and Yao had anything to say about it.

Yao. One more thing to resent Alfred for. Now that she was on his ship, with no clinic to go back to and no intention of leaving without Xiao Chun in tow, Arthur wasn't entirely sure how to get her off again.

The corridor outside his door was dark and silent, the air cool even through his wool coat, and, unsurprisingly, was completely dry. It was foolish to half expect the deck plating to be wet.

He ought to check the ship's wards. The dream had been the product of stress and alcohol, but there was a slim possibility that some fluctuation in the _Ariel's_ wards had contributed to it; he would have sensed such a thing even in his sleep, and it would explain why he'd dreamed of magical disaster and his ship in peril rather than falling from the _Arial's_ gondola, or being covered in spiders, or being inexplicably naked in the middle of Bonnefoy's crowded dining club.

Several minutes later, Arthur stood in his pajamas and slippers and coat in the engine room and examined his spell focus. The circle and sigils inlaid into the floor were undamaged – unsurprisingly – and the low, steady hum of the magic he'd sunk into the _Ariel's_ framework was as familiar a part of the ship's background sensations as the vibration of the engines.

Still, something felt off, as it had since he'd woken.

Arthur stepped into the middle of the circle and closed his eyes, reaching out to feel for the different layers of his spells. The anti-combustion ward first, even on a ship with a helium gas bag, because fire always came first onboard any ship. Then the pressurization ward, the concealment spell – inactive, but ready to be brought back to life whenever needed with the addition of a little power or blood – and the structural, temperature, and weather wards.

They were all fine, even in the portion of the airship where Alfred's flying boat had been, despite his worries that the spells to make it fit and stay in position might have distorted them.

Nevertheless, the sense of wrongness was still there, itching at the back of his mind as if Alfred's damn statue had never left the ship.

"What are you doing?" Yao's voice came from behind him, sharp and demanding, and it took all of Arthur's self-control not to jump out of his skin.

Arthur turned with deliberate slowness to see her standing in the engine room's doorway. Her hair was down rather than pulled up into the two tightly pinned buns she normally wore it in, and the sleeves of her too-large borrowed pajamas hung down to her finger tips; somehow, she still managed to look dignified.

"I'm checking the wards," he told her. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"You used so much power that I felt it in my sleep. That was _not_ you checking wards. That was-" she broke off, shaking her head. "Xiao Chun woke up, too, and she never had enough magical ability to be taught."

So Xiao Chun did have a tiny bit of power. It couldn't be much, or he would have sensed it – that, and she would never have been so unaffected by Alfred's statue – but he had wondered, once or twice. If nothing else, it would explain how she had avoided accidentally blowing her fingers off. 

Power tended to run in families. Arthur himself had never even known his parents' names, but the ability to see and feel magic and work it himself had been inherited from them as surely as his overly-bushy eyebrows, untamable hair, and inability to tan.

And if Yao and Xiao Chun had felt something as well, then his nightmare had not been just a dream. Not a reaction to stress, or the effects of one too many nightcaps, or of a fluctuation in his apparently untouched and undamaged wards.

"I felt it, too," he said. "I thought perhaps something had happened to one of the ship's wards."

Yao stepped into the room, crossing her arms over her chest. Unlike Alfred, she knew more than enough to keep her feet away from the edges of Arthur's spell circle while he was inside of it, and stopped several inches away, staring down at it. "It wasn't your wards," she said – a statement, not a question. 

Arthur shook his head. "No," he said. "It was… something else." Rips in the sea floor. The islands of the Archipelago tearing themselves apart. Cold, slimy-feeling magic that felt and tasted like Anostan relics seeping up from the abyss.

She stared up at him, eyes narrowed accusingly. "But you know what it was."

"No," he said grimly. "But I have a fairly good idea."

***

The room was excruciatingly bright, so much that his eyes kept tearing up. He tried not to blink, both because he didn't want to give the assholes who were interrogating him the satisfaction, and because the world lurched slightly every time he did.

"There's no need for all this unpleasantness." The man's voice was faintly sorrowful, as if locking prisoners in tiny cells without food or water or sleep and beating the shit out of them was something he truly regretted having to do.

So it was nice, polite interrogator time again. Beautiful. Frankly, he preferred the ones who shouted abuse at him and threatened to blow his brains out if he didn't talk. 

"If you would only co-operate, Captain, none of this would be necessary. How many airships are stationed in the Northern Straights? How long are their patrols?"

"Fuck you," Gilbert told him, forcing his lips into the closest thing to a grin that he could summon up. The split in the bottom one tore open again, but so what? It would have done that anyway as soon as the interrogator dropped the nice act and started backhanding him.

He didn't even see the man move, though to be fair, he wasn't at his usual awesome best right now. The interrogator's fist slammed into his stomach hard enough to knock all the air out of him, and sent him staggering back into the wall.

Gilbert doubled over, wheezing, but managed to keep his feet. For one long moment his lungs refused to work, and then he sucked in a pathetic gasp of air. "Ha. Gloves are off now. Knew they wouldn't send someone your size to make nice." 

Tonight's interrogator was huge. Really huge. Taller even than Ludwig, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest and hands that were practically the size of Gilbert's entire head. It might have been the lack of sleep messing with his perceptions, but he was pretty sure that the man really was just that big.

"We _have_ been nice to you so far, Captain Beilschmidt." The interrogator actually smiled at him. He was maybe only a couple of years older than Gilbert, which made him young for the colonel's insignia on his uniform collar, and might even have been attractive, if Gilbert had been able to see him properly instead of squinting at him against the near-blinding glare.

The lamps hanging from the ceiling had mirrors on the insides of the shades, and so did the reading lamp on the bare wooden desk that – along with a padded desk chair – was the room's only piece of furniture. Colonel Asshole had tilted the metal shade up to face Gilbert when he'd come into the room. 

It was a clever design. He ought to remember it for Roderich; he was always complaining that the reading lamp in his quarters was too dim.

"You were stationed aboard the airship _Iron Cross_. Our intelligence confirms that, so there's no harm in admitting so. We already know your airships in the Northern Straights resupply at Nordhaven, so it won't hurt to talk about that, either."

The only thing on the desk other than the Hel-begotten reading lamp was a handgun, something heavy-looking, maybe a .44 or .45 caliber. The other man had lain it down casually with the muzzle pointed toward Gilbert, and proceeded to ignore it since then. 

You had to admire his technique. The blurry, dark shape taunted him with the possibilities of what he could do with it if he could just get past his interrogator to the desk, if he could move and scoop it up quickly enough, if his hands weren't cuffed behind him.

"It really would be much better for you to talk to me, Captain. I wish I could promise you more pleasant quarters until the war was over, but I don't want to lie to you. You're never going to leave this facility. Murdering three airships' full of Thembrian soldiers is not something the Emperor will let pass by. But we can make sure you receive a clean, fast execution."

As opposed to a slow, torturous death, or dying as a sacrifice to some Thembrian god, if the propaganda leaflets were right. "Tempting offer," Gilbert told him.

Colonel Asshole smiled. "I knew you would be reasonable about this."

Gilbert smiled back. "Our patrols are… oh, wait. You know, you guys have hit me in the head so many times that I forgot. Fuck you."

He was expecting the blow this time, and tightened all his stomach muscles in readiness for it before the fist landed.

This time, it only knocked him back a step. 

"Manners, Captain. I expected-" A high-pitched ringing sound blotted out the rest of whatever the interrogator was saying.

Gilbert forced himself to straighten up, swaying a little as the floor under him dipped and tilted sideways for a moment. The man's mouth was still moving, but no sound was coming out of it; it was kind of hypnotic.

If he just ignored everything and lay down on the floor, how many second of rest could he get before the man started kicking his ribs in?

He could probably kill him that way – as big as his hands were, his feet were probably the size of cinderblocks. Then his superiors would reprimand him for killing the prisoner before they could get any information out of him, and Gilbert could look down at him from Valhalla and drink a toast to his demotion.

"You're really tall," he found himself saying. "I didn't know the Thembrian army took circus freaks as officers."

Sound came rushing back as soon as he spoke, the return of it almost as dizzying as the ringing sound had been.

How many hours had it been since he'd slept? Days, probably. They kept waking him up, kicking at him whenever he closed his eyes.

He'd slept on the ship, after they had pulled him out of the water and given him tea laced with vodka and a blanket and in general acted like the civilized people everyone knew Thembrians weren't. Then they'd brought him here, and it had been nothing but cold, dark cells and cold seawater to drink – as if he hadn't gotten enough of that already during those endless few minutes floating in the North Sea – and hours of interrogators asking him the same questions over and over.

"I didn't know that the Thuringian army took men with genetic defects."

Hah. There was a satisfying note of anger in the interrogator's voice now, instead of that serene calm. "Oh, we take everybody. We just don't make being defective a requirement like you guys do."

The gloves were really off, now. Gilbert could feel himself smiling again as the interrogator's fingers closed around his throat, forcing his chin upright so that the blinding light was directly in his eyes. All the interrogators resorted to violence eventually; getting them to do it at his instigation meant that control over the situation was back where it belonged; with him.

The tip of one big finger pulled his left eyelid down, the touch almost gentle. "Most people with poor vision wear spectacles. Sorcerers' spells mean that you're either too vain to, or that spectacles wouldn't help with whatever was wrong."

They hadn't, of course. Albinism wasn't the same thing as near-sightedness, as the town doctor had patiently explained to him when he'd been seven or eight, showing him pictures of white rabbits and rats and warning him about sun damage. His eyes had been better than some, according to Dr. Fehr and the various eye doctors after that, but not good enough. Not good enough to fly. 

Odin had fixed that for him, thanks to the sorcerers' corps, in return for things Gilbert would have gladly given anyway.

"I wonder," the interrogator murmured into his ear, "if we dripped acid onto your eyelids, would you go blind as soon as the marks were burned off, or will it take until the acid eats through your eyelid and into your eyeballs?"

Gilbert froze, feeling exactly like one of those pathetic rabbits from those long ago pictures. He'd been wary and on-edge for days, knowing that a nice, clean execution or a long, boring stretch in a frozen POW camp in the Thembrian wilderness would be what he got if he was _lucky_ , but for the first time since he'd taken the hot thermos of tea between numb hands and tried to drink it, only to realize that the sailor who ended up having to guide his shaking hands to his mouth was speaking Thembrian, he felt truly afraid.

"Fuck you," he whispered. "Cut my eyeballs out and eat them if you want. I still won't tell you anything."

This time, when the blow came, it knocked him to the floor.

A nice, surprisingly comfortable floor, even with his hands cuffed behind him. Gilbert closed his eyes and let himself fall into blackness.

***

Technically, the Imperial Army's special operations unit was an elite force under the joint command and supervision of the regular army and the department of state security. In practice, the regular army considered them police spies dressed up to look like soldiers, and the organs of state security considered them to be little better than thugs – errand boys, assassins, and butchers, rather than intelligence agents.

They were neither, of course – Ivan and his men _were_ soldiers, with the possible exception of Von Bock, who was really a scientist and intellectual at heart. Even Laurinaitis was a soldier, albeit a poor one. They were simply soldiers able to see the bigger picture, and able to be trusted with operations and information too sensitive for ordinary troops.

But the end result of their in-between status and convoluted chain of command was that outside of the capitol, where they had their own headquarters, special operations was always squeezed into offices and barracks as an afterthought. 

The office the six of them were currently crammed into was no exception. The floor was carpeted rather than bare concrete, and someone had wedged five desks into the space and hung a portrait of the emperor on one of the otherwise empty walls, but little had been provided beyond that. He had had to instruct Laurinaitis to go acquire them a file cabinet, and the telephone line hadn't been installed until yesterday morning.

Łukasiewicz leaned over Laurinaitis's shoulder and reached for the sheet of carbon paper the podporuchik had wound into the typewriter. "You're not even using it, and I have reports to fill out." 

"I am using it." Laurinaitis hunched his shoulders and shielded the typewriter with one arm.

"No you're not; you're just sitting there staring at the Captain when you think she's not looking."

"What?" Laurinaitis snapped up from his protective curl over the typewriter. "No I'm not, I-"

Just as Ivan began to wonder whether he should step in, Natalia spoke.

"Don't you have work to do, poruchiks?"

She didn't look up from her desk blotter, where she was disassembling and cleaning a M5981 hand gun. 

Laurinaitis immediately straightened his spine and resumed his typing. He hadn't always been so twitchy, but their last assignment had been hard on him. He must have done well in training in order to be assigned to special operations in the first place, but not everyone was capable of doing the work they did. Ivan was undecided as to how to handle the situation; another officer would be less lenient and less understanding, but after his failure to do the job properly in Bjarmaland, it was clear that Laurinaitis belonged somewhere working as a clerk or an officer's driver rather than in the field.

Being re-assigned from special operations carried a stigma that would haunt the rest of his career. Men didn't just transfer out from under state security; they were sent to keep an eye on their new superiors, or shuffled out of the way after embarrassing failures, carrying the taint of official censure with them, or quietly sent home in forced retirement when their drinking got out of control. Alcoholism was an occupational hazard at all levels in state security.

It made it easier to relax and sleep, and there was nothing like vodka for getting the taste of blood or the particular rotting-meat scent of death out of your mouth.

Katushya set a stack of reports on Ivan's desk, ignoring the bickering around her with the ease of long practice. "Are there any further orders from the general?" She omitted the 'sir'; being a younger brother effectively cancelled out any differences in rank.

"We're to continue assisting the local security office." Ivan hadn't been down to the sub-basement tunnels in a full week, not since the General's initial experiment; he wasn't sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.

"After all that rush to get the statue, they have us sitting on our hands again." She said it without rancor, more amused than annoyed. Like Ivan, she had long since learned how to wait patiently for orders.

Natalia, less patient, snorted. "I spent three weeks on a festering, insect infested pile of volcanic rock trying to keep the thugs assigned to help me from single-handedly opening up a new front in the war through sheer incompetence. I was told it was going to turn the tide of the war."

Ivan shrugged. "It's only been a week. Magic takes time." He should reprimand her, he knew. Too many complaints or criticisms of an assignment made one look disloyal, and while he knew she was never that – not his baby sister – it set a bad example for Łukasiewicz and Laurinaitis, who both had enough bad habits as it was.

"Captain von Bock said it did something, at least, sir," Laurinaitis said. They got a bunch of strange energy emissions out of it before all the instruments broke." When Ivan turned to look at him, he'd dropped his eyes to his typewriter again.

"How about the blood eagle?" Natalia asked. "Did you get anything out of him?"

"Nothing useful." Ivan shrugged. "I'll try again later; a few more days in a cell will soften him up." It always did, even with the ones who refused to make it easy on themselves. Sometimes, just the imprisonment alone would be enough to convince prisoners to co-operate.

Ivan preferred those times. The alternative was always unpleasant for everyone involved.

"He's a pilot, isn’t he? Take one of his eyes. Once he knows you're serious, he'll do anything to keep the other one."

There were moments, Ivan reflected, when his little sister scared even him.

She hadn't seen or spoken with the prisoner, but she was very probably correct about the fastest way to break him despite that – the Thuringian had reacted to his threat to blind him more strongly than to anything else Ivan had said or done. On the other hand, actually maiming people was so messy and permanent. And prisoners who were _too_ broken no longer gave reliable information.

Sometimes, getting the answer you needed was more important than getting an answer that was strictly truthful, but this was not one of those times.

"We don't want him to be willing to do or say anything," he told her. "We just want him to be willing to cooperate. If all the army needed was a broken prisoner, they could do that themselves. They wouldn't need us for it."

Natalia shrugged. "It was just a suggestion."

Before he could respond, there was a knock on the door – sharp and strong, not quiet and hesitant the way some army personnel's knocks were.

"Katushya, would you mind-" Ivan began.

She was at the door before he could finish.

The officer barely acknowledged her before stepped through and saluting Ivan. "The general requires you, sir."

Ivan tried not to look too eager as he pulled his uniform cap and gloves back on and collected his greatcoat. 

As he followed the man out of the room, he heard Łukasiewicz murmuring to someone – probably Laurianitis – "Good. Maybe now we'll finally get to do something."

The walk through the tunnels to the cavern took just as long as ever, and Ivan was glad he'd remembered the coat this time; if anything, the tunnels were even colder than before. The officer sent to fetch him ignored his attempts to make conversation, hurrying them both along the passageways as if he couldn't get through them quickly enough.

It was ridiculous of him, and Ivan almost said so. There was nothing down here but rock, storage rooms, and the sorcerers' cavern. It might almost be peaceful if it weren't so clammy and cold.

There were few places in Thembria that weren't cold, this time of year.

The cavern looked the same; the shorted-out electrical equipment had either been repaired or replaced, and there were fewer men monitoring it now that the beginning phase of the project was over, but everything else was just as it had been the last time he'd come down here.

The general was waiting for him in the exact same spot, standing on the little rise in the stone floor with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Ah, Podkolpovnik Braginsky. Just the man I was waiting for." General Winter smiled at him, the almost affectionate expression sitting oddly on his usually grim features.

Ivan found himself standing up straighter, instinctively trying to be worthy of that smile. "You sent for me, general, sir?"

"And I suppose you want to know why?" the general said. Before Ivan could think of a proper answer, he nodded toward the faraday cage and its weirdly glowing contents. "What do you see when you look at that, Braginsky?"

Ivan studied the giant metal cage for a moment. The ancient statue was still in place on its stand, faintly lit by the purplish-black light emanating from the air above it. The rip in the air seemed to twist and flex slightly as he stared at it, and while he couldn't be sure, Ivan thought it might be slightly longer and wider that it had been at first.

"Power," he said finally. "I don't know how we'll use it, but I'm sure the sorcerers and the scientists will work something out."

"You're a smart man, podkolpovnik. And a loyal servant of the empire." The general actually reached out and rested one hand on Ivan's shoulder.

Ivan stiffened in surprise, shocked at this sudden display of familiarity. General Winter had been his commanding officer for three years, and they had worked closely together for much of that time, but the general had never been a friendly man. Harsh and ruthless and iron-willed, and a visionary when it came to politics and military tactics, but never friendly.

"General?" he ventured tentatively.

"Don't look so wary, podkolpovnik. I'm going to reward you."

Ivan smiled nervously. Official rewards were not always entirely positive things. Was his unit being sent back out into the field, reassigned to something more prestigious than pacifying rebellious territories like Bjarmaland, but equally as dangerous? Being sent in secret to the Southern Archipelago to fetch back more ancient artifacts? This close to the winter solstice, any assignment south of Voloskaya was a reward in and of itself.

"Power." The general shook his head slightly, left, then right. "What you see in this cave isn't simply power. It's the future. Magic controlled and aided by science. The rift isn't simply an energy source. It has much more to offer us, to offer Thembria, than that."

Ivan nodded. Power, like knowledge, was never valuable simply for its own sake. It brought safety – from enemies, from fear, from one's own weaknesses.

"Are you a follower of Perun, podkolpovnik?"

Ivan shrugged, unsure how to answer; the general himself was a religious man, or at least, he had been at one time, so answering that he didn't particularly care about the gods one way or the other would be… impolitic. They existed – the magic sorcerers could work in their names was proof of it – but to ordinary men who couldn't call on any kind of magical power, one god was the same as another. Thuringian runes protected airships from lightning as well as Perun's hexagrams did, and he had a prisoner currently cooling his heels and adjusting his attitude in Kholmagorsk's cells to prove it. "No more or less than any other man, general."

"A very politic answer. Sometimes, when a man's circumstances change, he must leave behind old allies in order to accept the aid of new ones. The Thuringrike attacks us from the west, the Albans and their puppets in the Southern Archipelago obstruct our trade with Opar, and the Kazharans sign trade agreements and send diplomats and wait for the moment when fighting the Thuringrike has made us weak enough for them to take back their old territories. The emperor's heir is a sickly child unlikely to survive to adulthood, and no less than half a dozen noblemen with claims to the throne watch every breath the boy takes, hoping it will be the last. Bjarmaland and Anatolia refuse to accept Thembrian guidance and conspire with our enemies."

"The empire is strong," Ivan objected. "We're winning along the western front."

"Not yet." The general smiled. "But we soon will be. And you, Podkolpovnik Braginsky, are going to be a vital part of that victory."

So they were being sent back into the field. Ivan drew in a deep breath, tasting salt and wet seaweed in the back of his throat, and tried not to smile too widely. No more borrowed offices and days spent wading through paperwork and trying to eke another few pages out of Laurianitis's fading typewriter ribbon. No more bored Natalia being borderline insubordinate. No more smiling and pretending to be unoffended when soldiers who had spent their entire careers safely inside the empire called them butchers behind their backs. 

"We've had a great deal of success with our preliminary experiments," the general said. While Ivan blinked at the sudden change of topic, he nodded at the Faraday cage once more. "Increased strength, increased endurance, resistance to pain. Wounds on the subjects heal almost over-night, and thus far only complete dismemberment followed by burning has succeeded in killing one."

"That's good, sir," Ivan said. They were using the statue to cast protective wards on people? That seemed like almost a waste of its power; anything that could create magic visible the naked eye could surely do more than that. Destroy airships and battleships, level cities. The Anostans had tapped into the power of the Earth itself, and blown themselves nearly off the map in the process, and that was without modern technology.

"There are…" the general hesitated for a fraction of a moment, as if searching for the correct word, "beings beyond the rift. Entities more powerful than a dozen Peruns or Odins. And they are willing to share that power."

That purple-black rip in the air was a portal to the realm of the gods? 

Ivan stared at it, unsure whether to be awed or afraid. All the gods, or just the ancient Anostan ones?

He'd always assumed that most of what the priests said about other realms and the underworld was largely myth.

"You're certain, sir?"

The general smiled. "Very. They ask very little in return, merely a few small sacrifices. The future is through that rift, and the Deep Ones will help us achieve it."

"I'm not a priest, general, sir," Ivan ventured. "Or a sorcerer. What do I-"

"What does this have to do with you?" The general's grin widened, white teeth gleaming in the cavern's rippling underwater light. "I'm going to make you indestructible."

Indestructible. Increased strength, the general had said. Faster healing. Resistance to pain. Perhaps he'd been premature in deciding that putting protective wards on soldiers was a waste of time. 

"I'm honored to serve the empire in any way I can, sir," Ivan told him.

Half an hour later, as General Winter's head sorcerer began explaining exactly what acquiring this strength and indestructability would entail, Ivan found himself wishing it were possible to have second thoughts. 

"You want to do what to my heart?"

The sorcerer took a step back, then looked annoyed with himself for doing so. He straightened his spine as if trying to stand taller, though the fraction of an inch it gave him did nothing to change the fact that his eyes were level with Ivan's chin. "The process requires removal of the heart. It's symbolic," he stressed, as if Ivan were an illiterate peasant who didn't understand how sympathetic magic worked.

"So you aren’t actually removing it."

"Of course we are? Weren't you listening? The removal of the heart in particular is necessary because of its role in Anostan culture as the locus of both emotion and intellect. The creation of space within the thoracic cavity is necessary in order to make room for the Deep Ones' touch, but the physical organ also serves as a symbolic stand in for the soul."

Saying no was not an option. Men who refused an order from someone of General Winter's rank, in an operation at this level of security clearance, did not have to worry about the potential effect on their careers. They were "re-assigned pending official investigation" and simply not heard from again.

Power, Ivan reminded himself. He needed to remain in the general's favor, in order to keep his rank, to keep the influence necessary to protect Laurianitis and Natalia from official censure. And Katushya as well – most of his subordinates, if they were careful enough, would survive unscathed if Ivan himself fell from grace, but not his sisters.

"Don't look so fearful, Braginsky," General Winter said. "You're not cannon fodder from the steppes. We'll keep your heart safe and secure for you. The Deep Ones will have plenty of souls to nourish them without needing to give them yours, especially once the tides of the war begin to turn."

Two of the five sorcerers came forward to take Ivan by the arms and escort him to a low, flat block of stone that had been placed below the rift, right at the base of the statue's metal stand. There were metal shackles attached to the four corners of the block.

"You won't be needing those," General Winter said, as the head sorcerer bent to reach for one. "Podkolpovnik Braginsky here is a solder, one of his excellency the emperor's special operations officers, not a convict or conscript." His hand settled on Ivan's shoulder again and rested there for a moment, a heavy weight. 

Ivan unfastened his uniform buttons with numb fingers, barely feeling the cold as his overcoat and uniform jacket fell open. The general was right; they wouldn't need the shackles. He'd suffered through things nearly as bad for far less potential gain.

Indestructible, he reminded himself. Lie still and let them work, and then no one will be able to hurt you again.

"Pain is a necessary sacrifice in order to grow stronger." The general gave Ivan a gentle but implacable push forward, toward the altar. "Make me proud, Ivan Ivanovich."

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Nordhaven is named after Nordholz, a German naval air station used as an airship port by the Imperial Navy during WWII, and the nearby German towns of Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven.
> 
> \- M5981 is the model number of the [Nagant M1895 revolver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagant_M1895) rendered backwards (the Nagant was main handgun used by the NKVD up into the 1930s, when it was phased out in favor of the Tokarev subautomatic).


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The authors neither recommend nor endorse becoming the willing tool of a brutal, totalitarian regime. Additionally, if one is contemplating selling one’s soul to eldritch abominations in return for invulnerability, the authors highly suggest that one read the fine print.

"How much progress have you made on repairing the wards?"

His new sorcery specialist sighed. "I'm doing what I can, but…"

"Just give me a time estimate,” Ludwig said. “How long until all of them are back up?"

"That depends. Do we have any crewmen we don't need?" Oberleutnant Popescu hesitated, then added, "Sir," as if belatedly remembering that insubordination was a punishable offense.

Ludwig assumed it had been a poor attempt at humor, but it was difficult to tell with the sorcerers' corp. Some of them had an even more morbid sense of humor than the pilots, while others didn't appear to be aware that humor existed at all. Popescu's predecessor had been sent to the _Iron Cross_ after his superiors had discovered that he had been experimenting with using captive Kvenlander resistance fighters as sacrifices. He'd supposedly confined himself to bloodletting, and avoided actually killing or mutilating them, and had seemed to think that this somehow excused violating all the rules of war by treating POWs like sacrificial animals.

It had been hard to summon up much regret when the man had died, despite the three months it had taken before Popescu had been sent to replace him.

Two months later, he was still feeling his new sorcerer out. "Just give me an estimate, Oberleutnant," Ludwig said patiently. "Assume human sacrifices aren't available."

Popescu pulled a face, and said, "There's a limit to what I can do while we're underway, and how much I can do on my own. I've brought the anti-combustion wards back up, but they're still understrength. I can have the air pressure and temperature wards back in place by the end of the week, but they'll be under-strength, too, and the structural wards need to be re-applied directly to the ship's superstructure and skin. We need to return to Nordhaven to repair those."

Ludwig nodded. "Thank you, Oberleutnant. I'll take it under advisement. Carry on."

Popescu correctly interpreted that as a dismissal, and left without saluting. For a moment, Ludwig considered calling him back to reprimand him, and then gave it up as a lost cause. The sorcerers' corps was only nominally subject to military discipline anyway. Sorcerers were too hard to come by for the navy to be picky; at least this one wasn't likely to start sacrificing enlisted men while Ludwig's back was turned.

Popescu was right; they should return to Nordhaven to have their wards repaired. In her current state, the _Iron Cross_ wouldn't survive another battle like the last one, especially not with her hunting squadron escort reduced to only two planes. He needed to request a replacement pilot – two was not enough – but he couldn't bring himself to. Not yet. Tomorrow. He would put the request in tomorrow.

Maybe Leutnant Adnan would be motivated to behave if he had a more obedient example to follow. Over the past two weeks, he'd gone from being borderline insubordinate to Oberleutnant Hedervary to blatantly so. Because she was a woman, Ludwig assumed. Adnan was from Ionia, one of the province's many Anatolian refuges; they didn't have female soldiers in Ionia, and many Ionians resented taking orders from a woman. Elizaveta's sex hadn't been a problem before now, but now that she was in a command position…

He managed to suppress a wince at the thought this time. Eventually, he would be able to think of her as his squadron commander without that internal flinch, but right now it was like poking at the raw space where a broken tooth had been.

Ludwig stood, automatically bracing himself against the table as the ship swayed. The wind was picking up. He needed to tell the helmsman to be careful; without structural wards, the ship could be damaged if he turned her broadside to the wind.

The Odin's knot rocked against the tabletop as his fingers brushed it. The back had always been slightly uneven, though not enough to matter while one was wearing it.

He hadn't put it on since the battle, hadn't even touched it. It still lay on the table where Airman Vargas had put it, a silent reminder of what he'd lost.

Gilbert had always been the devout one, in his own bloodthirsty way. Ludwig had only worn the thing because Gilbert had made it for him, a match to his own, as a present when he'd first entered the Navy. 

Ludwig wasn’t sure he believed in Valhalla, or that an eternity of fighting was really any kind of reward. Maybe the Ionians had it right, with their fields of flowers. 

Just as it did every evening, there came a timid knock on his door.

He was tempted to once again simply wait until whomever it was went away, but no, this had gone on for long enough. 

Ludwig crossed the two steps to the door, opened it, and caught Airman Vargas in the act of bending down to set a tray of coffee and biscuits on the floor.

Vargas squeaked and jerked upright, just barely managing to keep the coffee mug from tipping over. "Sir! I, I came to—here you go I brought you coffee sorry for disturbing you." He blurted the words out without pausing for breath, holding the tray out toward Ludwig like an offering.

He should have guessed it had been Vargas. The trays had been appearing outside his door at the end of the evening watch every night for the past two weeks. Since Vargas had caught him at a weak moment and offered him that immensely inappropriate hug.

Ludwig automatically reached out to take the tray before Vargas could drop it. "Thank you, Airman Vargas," he said. He tried to smile, the expression feeling stiff and unnatural. 

Vargas beamed back at him. "You're welcome, Korvettenkapitän, sir. I left it black because I know you like it that way, but there's sugar and powered milk on the tray in case you change your mind."

"Thank you, Airman Vargas," Ludwig said again. This time, the smile came more easily.

***

"Clear," Alfred shouted as the Eagle's engines sputtered to life and the propellers began to turn. They were a good twenty feet offshore, far away from any bystander who might wander too near the prop, but the shout was ingrained habit.

He revved the engines, watching the line on the engine gauge climb nearly into the red and listening for any flaw in their rhythm, and then backed off on the throttle and started the countdown. 

"Flaps set, props full forward, mixture is rich…"

This commission ought to be another routine flight – a normal one, involving no Thembrians whatsoever, because that was their new business rule: no Thembrians.

Eagle Transport was a careful and responsible business that had only ever lost one cargo and was not going to repeat the experience ever again. Or get involved in the mainland's war in any way, or do anything else to invite trouble.

So delivering mosquito netting and dry goods to Carcosa was responsible, not boring. Once there, they were to pick up a cargo of fish (and, of course, mail) and take it back to Ninguaria on their return trip, so that it could be shipped out to the mainland.

"Fish, Mattie," Alfred muttered, as the Eagle skimmed over the surface of the water and slowly lifted into the air. "Dead fish. Why are we trying to avoid smuggling again?"

Matthew either didn't hear him over the engine noise, or was ignoring him; Alfred had his money on 'ignoring.' He'd been doing that a lot lately.

It had been a rhetorical question anyway. After their extended interaction with Arthur - _Kirkland_ , Alfred corrected himself – and his fellow pirates, it was even more important to keep Eagle Transport on the up-and-up. They avoided Ninguaria altogether for the first week of so, just in case they were somehow wanted for their incidental role in burning down part of the harbor district; just because you were a hero, after all, did not guarantee that other people would correctly recognize you as one.

When no word had reached Antillia about any local pilots being wanted by the governor's office for involvement in burning down the harbor district and murdering Thembrian nationals, they'd relaxed. The blame had apparently been placed on the Thembrians, where it belonged. 

The fire in Porta di Vulcani had been big news on all three of the last islands they'd stopped off, and in each case, the explanation given for what happened was different – pirate attack, Thembrian saboteurs trying to stop trade with Thuringia, and the more prosaic "volcanic eruption" theory (everyone agreed that the volcano on Ninguaria was overdue for an eruption, having done nothing but smoke ominously for the last five years).

Thank whatever gods looked after airmen that the last one wasn't true. With the exception of the worst of the winter storms, almost nothing else the archipelago could throw at you was worse than volcanic ash. 

"I was thinking we could pay someone to put a temperature ward on the cargo area," Matthew said. "You know, for the fish. It's a full day's trip from Carcosa to Ninguaria."

"We're not asking Arthur for anything," Alfred snapped. "We'll pack it in ice."

"Of course not Arthur; we're trying to avoid trouble, not go looking for it. He's not the only magic worker in the archipelago. We can see if there's one on Carcosa we can commission."

"Oh, right. Yeah, I guess that's a good idea." Of course not Arthur. Why had he gone and brought the man up? It was a big island chain; with luck they wouldn't run into him again for months.

They probably wouldn't run into a magic worker whose fees they could afford between here and Carcosa either, but if not, ice would work well enough. 

"The wing patches seem to be holding up well enough." Which wasn't actually a change of subject from Arthur Kirkland. Crap. "Anyway, I was thinking, if we have some cash left over after we replace that part of the wing and hire the magic worker, I'm going to renew my subscription to _Incredible Tales_ and _Adventure Weekly_. I'm tired of reading the same two maintenance manuals over and over."

Monsters from space, hard boiled detectives, exotic lost cities, and rugged Oparite legionaries fighting bandits in the deserts of Karkar would be a good distraction from worrying about their bank account and thinking about stupid pirates.

"Let's skip the boring science fiction and get _Manly Tales of Adventure_ instead."

"I'm pretty sure that's actually some kind of gay pulp in disguise." The covers certainly implied it, with their lovingly illustrated art of mostly naked muscular men wrestling sharks and doing other improbably violent things. It was slightly embarrassing, the same way the half-naked women on the cover of some of the detective pulps occasionally were, and for a few years as a kid Alfred had secretly collected them for the pictures, but the stories in _Adventure Weekly_ were significantly better written.

"Yes," Matthew agreed, "but it's hilarious. 'In the torrid heat of the southern archipelago, men's darker passions are enflamed,'" he quoted. "And then they have sweaty wrestling matches with other men. And are saved from the dark enflamed passions of women by the noble purity of male friendship."

"You just like to snicker and feel superior when the writers get things wrong." Most of the writers for the big Alban pulp magazines had never set foot in the Southern Archipelago, and pretty much just made things up as they went along. Including things like geography, and what language they spoke in Ninguaria.

Carcosa was a five hour flight from their last docking at New Servage. The weather was nearly perfect – no ceiling, good visibility instead of the humid haze you so often got. There was even a slight tailwind, maybe enough to knock their flight time down to four and a half hours instead of five.

The only bad thing about flying was that it gave you a lot of time to think, especially once he'd exhausted Matthew's tolerance for playing "I'm thinking of something that starts with the letter 'A,' which usually happened about two hours in.

You'd think he'd be even more in need of something to occupy his brain then Alfred, since as co-pilot there wasn't much for him to do during an easy, routine flight except keep one eye on the clock, compass, and speedometer and the other on the aerial charts.

By the time they reached the little cluster of barren volcanic islets that marked the just-about-halfway point, Alfred had predictably run out of both internal and external distractions and started thinking about the _Ariel_ again.

Whatever the Thembrians had planned on doing with their ancient Anostan statue, they had probably done it by now. He'd been worried at first, imagining all kinds of curses and creepy, evil magic – most of it things that belonged in the pages of a pulp magazine rather than in reality – but obviously whatever it was hadn't worked.

If it had, they would have heard something about it by now, either about new Thembrians weapons or victories, or about Thuringian losses, or more attacks on Bjarmaland in the name of 'pacifying' rebels, or something. Instead, the only news about the mainland war that had reached the archipelago over the past month had been about attacks on merchant ships in the Ionian sea in reprisal for the Thuringrike's attacks on Thembrian shipping in the northern straights. That was worryingly close to the archipelago, but not the sort of thing you'd need extra magic to pull off.

Arthur had been worried over nothing, and the Thembrians had burned stuff down and gotten themselves killed by pirates for a historically significant but militarily useless piece of rock.

What a waste. It should have gone to a museum; the one in Ninguaria didn't have anything as finely detailed and completely undamaged. Usually the squid/octopus-man statues were missing at least one tentacle, or had had their features worn smooth by the ocean or been encrusted with the limestone skeletons of coral.

Arthur always worried too much. He'd been a fiercely serious kid, always scowling at everyone. Adults who came to visit the orphanage had avoided him, put off by the sullen glares and his blatant ignoring of their attempts to talk to him.

Arthur Kirkland the man could be charming when he really wanted to be; he never was to Alfred, but he'd seen him at Francis's with his crew, and occasionally with other men and women. Arthur the child had either never wanted to be charming, or not known how.

He'd already been there when Alfred and Matthew had gotten there, and had claimed he didn't even know who his real parents were; who knew how many times he'd been passed over for adoption already? Alfred got the feeling, looking back, that he'd just stopped trying.

He checked the altimeter and winced. The _Eagle_ 's nose was pointed too far upwards, and they had crept up nearly three hundred feet while Alfred hadn't been paying attention. He pushed the yoke forward fractionally and hoped Matthew hadn't noticed.

Arthur had still looked shaky when they'd left him. He was probably fine now, though. It wasn't like he'd been that badly hurt, not like the poor guy Alfred had carried into the _Ariel_ soaked in blood.

Vash, that was his name. He still hadn't gotten the stains out of his flight jacket. Even more than the black mark on Eagle Transport's record, it made him wish he'd never taken the Thembrians' commission. And not just because of Vash's wound and his jacket.

Vash had been practically gutted. Any decent man concerned about the welfare of the people he'd helped rescue would have worried about him. Instead, Alfred kept remembering how pale Arthur had been when he'd seen him lying in that bunk, the way he'd nearly passed out trying to undo the spells he'd put on the _Eagle_. 

Maybe it was natural. They weren't friends anymore – weren't anything to one another anymore, not after so many years – but Arthur was the one he'd carried out of a burning building, and he saw a lot more of him on and off on Antillia and in various other ports around the archipelago than he did Vash, who rarely came into Francis's and hoarded his vocabulary like it was worth money whenever you tried to strike up a friendly conversation.

"Uh, Alfred?" Matthew leaned over from the co-pilot's seat to poke his shoulder. "We've lost a thousand feet of altitude."

"Shit," Alfred swore, feeling his face start to turn red. He was better than this. He adjusted the controls again, and tried valiantly to ignore Matthew's oh-so-mild suggestions that he hand the airplane over for a while.

Forget Arthur; he had a job to do.

***

Fires were still burning in the eastern half of the city. Ivan could smell the smoke as he climbed out of the staff car, though the wind should have carried it away.

He breathed in and smiled to himself. Inside his head, the Deep Ones hummed their pleasure.

"They have the prisoners contained for now," Natalia said, falling in at his elbow. "Several were injured when the bomb hit, but they don't have a casualty count." She sneered at the nervous-looking prison guard who was hovering a few feet away. "Too busy being afraid of a break-out attempt."

"We will take care of that for them," Ivan told her. 

He strode past her without waiting to see her response. She would do as she was ordered, as he would.

"Does your building have a public address system installed?" 

The guard blinked at him, looking for a moment like a stupefied fish. "It's, it's broken, sir."

Ivan smiled at him, and he went even paler.

"Nevermind," Ivan said. "The tanks will be here in a few minutes. I'll use one of their radios."

"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," the guard babbled, but Ivan had already stopped listening.

The murmuring inside his head was so much more interesting. His fear before his awakening seemed alien to him now; more than power and strength, it had brought him clarity. He knew what his purpose was now.

The tanks took slightly longer to arrive than he'd predicted, but that was all right. A few minutes delay wouldn't change anything.

Poruchik Łukasiewicz moved the staff car to make way for them without needing to be told.

It was cold enough that steam mixed with the exhaust and coiled in a wreath around the automobile. Cold and clear – the kind of weather that was rare in Kholmagorsk, which spent half the winter being lashed by storms and half the spring and summer under a cold drizzle. The Thuringians preferred to make bombing runs in clear weather.

Once, the cold wind would have cut through his coat and chilled him to the bone. Before; when he'd been weak. He didn't need his scarf and gloves now, barely needed the heavy greatcoat.

The tanks drew up in a neat row of three in the square in front of Sadkovsky prison, or what was left of it. Part of the façade was crumbling, and a large hole had been made in the roof of the left wing. Behind the still-intact metal bars, the glass in most of the windows was broken.

Sadkovsky had been built in the previous century as a hospital for sailors, and a bronze star was still bolted to the brick over the front door. The state police had converted it to a prison decades ago, but had never bothered to take the various nautical flourishes down.

Some of the inmates were thieves, those either too small time to merit being sent north to the labor camps, or still awaiting the completion of their trial and sentencing. Or smugglers and black-marketeers, or petty murderers of the sort who were found standing next to the body with the bloody kitchen knife still in their hand. They were of little concern – insignificant men whose crimes were equally insignificant. If they took advantage of the chaos caused by the bombing in order to escape, they would only end up right back in police custody within a few weeks, accused of some new drunken assault or petty crime.

Ivan was here to deal with the other prisoners.

Turned up to full volume, the central tank's radio was easily loud enough to be heard inside the prison, especially with the windows broken.

"All prisoners arrested and pending trial on political charges are to exit the building and form lines in an orderly manner." Ivan spoke into the radio handset, taking care to make his words as loud and clearly enunciated as possible. "By order of the emperor, you have been mobilized into the Thembrian Army. Your cases will be closed. All prisoners arrested and pending trial on political charges please exit the building and form lines in the square," he repeated. "You are being mobilized into the Thembrian Army. You will receive amnesty from the emperor at the completion of your military service."

He returned the handset to the tank captain, who grinned at him. "Guess that's one way to make use of the bastards, right, Podkolpovnik?"

Ivan smiled back at him. It was good when people were pleased to obey orders. "Once the prisoners have finished lining up, you will order your men to open fire on them. Machine guns only, please. The cannon would further damage the façade."

Kapitan Vasilyev blinked at him. "Sir?"

"The prisoners will begin coming out in a moment. Please have your men prepare to fire."

The man was no longer smiling – a part of Ivan was distantly puzzled to see him looking almost ill. "That was an order, Kapitan Vasilyev," he clarified gently. "From State Security."

Vasilyev swallowed hard, and adjusted the radio's volume and frequency to pass the order on to the other two tanks.

Ivan nodded, smiled approvingly at him, and climbed out of the tank to watch the prisoners begin to line up. There were several hundred of them, and it took quite some time.

Natalia joined him again, a sneer on her face as she eyed the men slowly straggling into lines. They had yet to be given the close-shaven haircut and grey clothing of convicts, and most still wore the clothing they had been arrested in.

"We must be desperate if we're recruiting traitors," she said.

"Don't worry," Ivan assured her. "We're not."

She raised an eyebrow, awaiting an explanation. Instead, Ivan gestured for her to follow and walked to the far side of the square where Poruchik Łukasiewicz and the staff car waited, well out of the tanks' line of fire. No need to deafen themselves.

Once men had stopped emerging from the building, he beckoned the prison guard over.

"Is this everyone?"

The man nodded. "Except for a few who were injured when the roof caved in. The political arrests are confined in the left wing."

"Good."

Ivan turned toward the tanks, stepping slightly away from the guard and Natalia to make certain he was clearly visible, and gave the signal to fire.

The noise was nearly deafening, as multiple machine guns fired at once, the paths of bullets sweeping back and forth across the assembled prisoners. Some of them tried to run, but with tanks at two sides of the square, Ivan's staff car at the other, and the prison behind them, there was nowhere to go.

In the back of his mind, the Deep Ones made a series of pleased clicking sounds. All death pleased them, and the General had promised them vast amounts of it in return for the power they could offer Thembria. Thuringians, Bjarmalanders, Khazarans; those who threatened Thembria would die by the tens of thousands.

After an endless minute, the tanks ceased firing. Ivan breathed in the smell of blood and gunsmoke and felt a distant glow of satisfaction. These were Thembrians, not the foreigners the Deep Ones had been promised, but human political divisions were meaningless to them. Like the cold, they did not care who they killed, and now, merciless and impartial as winter, they would be Thembria's ultimate weapon against her enemies.

When he turned to smile at Natalia – he had been ordered not to speak of the general's bargain to any of his subordinates for the moment, but she would be so pleased when he eventually revealed it to her – she was staring at him with what looked almost like horror.

"The emperor conscripted them! Vanya, you can't-"

Ah, of course. He had neglected to tell her. "The emperor gave no orders. The prisoners were a threat with the prison damaged. State Security ordered us to neutralize that threat."

He turned back to survey the square. The prisoners lay piled on top of one another, the flagstones around them awash with blood. Over the ringing in his ears from the guns, he could hear a man's high-pitched keens of pain.

Ivan drew his pistol, walked to the edge of the pile of bodies where a middle-aged man lay curled on the ground, his stomach torn open by machinegun fire, and pressed the muzzle of the gun against the base of the man's skull.

He pulled the trigger, and the keening stopped.

"All those still alive get up!" he shouted.

For several moments, no one moved. Ivan chose a body at random, aimed, and fired into the man's torso. The corpse jerked slightly as the bullet hit it, but didn't otherwise move; dead. "Get up," he repeated. "Or the firing will resume."

Slowly, a handful of men began to climb to their feet. All were covered in blood, making it nearly impossible to tell which were injured, or how badly.

It didn't matter. They only needed to perform one task before they outlived their usefulness.

"You will take the corpses to the cemetery behind the Sadkovsky and dig a pit to bury them in," Ivan ordered. "Any who refuse to dig will be buried with the dead."

He reholstered his gun, turned on his heel, and crossed the bloody paving stones to speak to the prison guard again. 

"After they've finished, have them line up by the side of the grave and shoot them."

The guard stared at him dumbly, face white.

"Did you hear me?" Ivan asked, slightly concerned. "Are your ears all right?" He had taken the precaution of stuffing tissue paper in his during the car ride to the prison; he should have warned Natalia and the prison guards as well.

"Y-yes, sir," the guard said. 

Ivan smiled at him.

Inexplicably, the man actually started to cry.

Ivan repeated his instructions, walked back to the staff car, and ordered Łukasiewicz to drive them back to headquarters.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional notes:
> 
> \- _Manly Tales of Adventure_ ’s covers look [like](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-AciXQyWltIM/UxaaLh2ve8I/AAAAAAAAfAE/RsLYm0TX6m4/MANS-LIFE-September-1956.-Cover-by-W.jpg?imgmax=800) [this](http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c342/austex23/men_1955_12.jpg). And [this](http://lh3.ggpht.com/_5XvBYfxU_dM/TMeTRq_F7tI/AAAAAAAAOdE/-ag5vN4n-5U/AmericanManhood195305MayCoverbyPeter.jpg?imgmax=800). And [this](http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c342/austex23/mansconquest_1958_05.jpg). 
> 
> \- The Sadkovsky sailor’s hospital/prison is named after Sadko, the legendary merchant-adventurer/musician who won fortune and success by playing music for the Sea King.
> 
> \- Ivan’s actions in the final scene of this chapter are based on [a real massacre committed by the NKVD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_massacres_of_prisoners#Ukraine) in the city of Lutsk, in the Ukraine (which was slightly less depressingly relevant when we first started outlining this chapter back in July), by people who did not have the excuse of having been mindfucked by Lovecraftian abominations.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how we promised you guys zombies? (In related news, this fic is about to become significantly more violent)

It was still dark when he woke, sunrise several hours away. Winter days in Kholmagorsk were short, though they still fell short of the hours of darkness that reigned this time of year in the northern wastes.

Ivan stretched, feeling rested. He'd never slept well, even before he'd started working for state security, but last night's sleep had been deep and dreamless. He felt… good. No trace of the usual morning headache.

When was the last time he'd woken up without a hangover? Sometime before Bjarmaland.

He turned off the alarm he hadn't needed, making sure to wind the clock a few turns before setting it back on the night stand, and climbed out of bed, for once not flinching at the cold floor under his feet. It wasn't as bad as it usually was.

The officers' quarters in Kholmagorsk included semi private bathrooms, shared only with a handful of other men; this early, Ivan had the facilities all to himself. He used the toilet and then steeled himself against cold water and went to the sink to shave.

The eyes that met his in the mirror were not his own.

They weren't even human.

The dark blue-violet of his irises had brightened to an unnaturally vivid purple, and in the center, his pupils had folded themselves into a strange omega shape.

Slowly, feeling as oddly detached as if he were dreaming, Ivan lifted his nightshirt to examine his bare chest. A long, livid purple scar ran the length of his sternum.

_The knife came down, and the agony was unbearable. He didn't scream, but they had to hold him down after all, to keep his limbs from thrashing and his body from curling up around the wound. Far away, someone was making high-pitched whimpering noises. Then the whine of a saw grating against bone drowned it out._

It had been just under a month ago. They'd have had to crack his ribs to get his heart out, and yet when he pressed his finger against his chest, he didn't feel any pain. Just a faint ache deep inside, like having a bad chest cold. The accelerated healing must have worked.

He pressed his palm flat over the center of his chest and felt nothing, no heartbeat. Just the rise and fall of his breathing. How was he still alive, with no heart to pump his blood? What kept it circulating?

The faint susurrus of clicking and whispering noises at the edge of his hearing were not a comforting answer. Faint and distant as they were, they were still clearly audible even over the groan of the pipes and the rush of water from the tap.

He could remember being pleased by the sound, but that pleasure was as distant and hazy as all the rest of his memories since the sorcerers' knives.

The one thing that stood out clearly was yesterday's execution.

In retrospect, the tank commander's horrified stare and Natalia's protests made a great deal more sense. He'd been confused by them, unable to understand why anyone would question his orders while the Deep Ones' approval of them rang through him.

Natalia had likely believed his speech to the prisoners about the emperor's pardon; of course she'd been shocked when he'd ordered the tanks to fire on what she'd thought were the army's newest conscripts. He should have explained the situation to her beforehand; when had he stopped paying attention to what his subordinates thought?

The Deep Ones' power was no excuse for poor leadership.

Ivan pulled his nightshirt back down, not wanting to look at the scar any longer, and worked his shaving soap into a lather. He did his best to shave without meeting his own eyes.

He had ordered the execution of over two hundred Thembrians – Thembrian traitors, granted, men who'd already condemned themselves to death through their own actions, but still, Thembrian citizens – and the Deep Ones had rejoiced at the destruction and salivated for more. The General had promised them the deaths and destruction of Thembria's enemies to feed on, but human concepts like nations and alliances – and even promises – were meaningless to them. One dead human was the same as another. They wouldn't care if Thembria won or lost this war, as long as the bodies kept piling up. And he could still feel the vast, fathomless hunger inside him, and knew in that moment that that no amount of death would ever be enough for them.

Thembria could feed that vast hunger forever, and the Deep Ones would still demand more.

Did the General know? He must; he wouldn't have made a bargain with them without considering it from all the angles. General Winter had become a hero in the last war for his ability to predict his enemies' movements, and had kept his high rank in State Security through two government purges of the incompetent and disloyal.

But for all his studies of the rift and the beings that dwelled beyond it over the past months, the General hadn't been improved like Ivan had. Spending hours every day in the presence of the rift wasn't the same as feeling the Deep Ones' touch inside you.

He might know the Deep Ones cared little for human concerns – all gods likely did, Ivan suspected – might view them as a terrible, impartial force to be leveraged against their enemies, like the winter he was named after, but he didn't _know_ deep in his bones, how much they rejoiced in humanity's destruction. The terrible winter cold that swept down out of the northern wastes had been the Thembrian people's curse and guardian for generations, but it truly was impartial. 

Ivan had pictured the Deep Ones as something similar, just as the General likely had, and he'd been wrong. _They_ were not impartial. 

It was Ivan's duty to warn his superior of any threat to Thembria that he discovered.

How did he tell a great man like General Winter, a hero of Imperial Thembria, that the program he had poured time and resources and sacrifices into might have been a mistake?

Leaving the washroom and its mirrors and returning to his room should have been a relief, but now that he had woken from the daze the Deep Ones' touch had put him under, he didn't need to see the effects of it on his face in order to feel them. The whispers and clicks just at the edges of his hearing. The hollow echo of pain in his chest. 

_The knife came down, and he didn't scream, he didn't, he was a Thembrian soldier and he would be strong._

He had paused halfway through buttoning his uniform tunic, Ivan realized, and started to resume dressing.

The knock at the door almost made him jump.

"Yes?" Ivan called, fastening the final button.

"Vanya? It's me."

"Katushya?" Ivan got to his feet, a new thread of worry running through him. His sister never came to the men's barracks – unlike Natalia, Katushya rarely took advantage of the fact that Ivan was her brother to abandon military discipline.

"May I come in?" she asked.

Ivan was already opening the door. "Is everything all right?" He struggled to think of what might have gone wrong. "Was there a riot at the Sadkovsky? New orders from the General? Are the Thuringians-"

"No, nothing like that," Katushya interrupted, cutting him short. She edged past him into the room – Ivan automatically moving over to make way for her –and shut the door gently behind her.

"Natalia told me what happened yesterday," she said, after an awkward moment of silence during which Ivan was aware of his half-made bed and the night shirt he hadn't put away yet. No one ever came into his room except the base's cleaning staff. "I know it bothers you to-"

"I should have warned her beforehand," Ivan said. Was she sulking about it? Natalia hated being cut out of the loop, or feeling like their superiors were withholding information from her; it was an attitude she needed to get over if she meant to go any further in state security.

Maybe the General knew about the Deep Ones' true motivations and hadn't thought it necessary to pass the knowledge along to Ivan. He might already have a plan in place that took everything Ivan thought he needed to tell him into account.

"Yes," Katushya said, "you should have. And you shouldn't have taken Łukasiewicz. I thought he was going to be sick when you three came back."

"He'll get over it. He has to learn to accept what needs to be done."

_Make me proud, Ivan Ivanovich._

He rubbed at his chest, but the ache didn't go away. Had it hurt this much before?

She was staring at him, Ivan realized, and let his hand drop.

"Are you all right, Vanya?"

"Yes, of course," he said automatically. 

"Are you sure you're all right? It's not just yesterday; anyone would be shaken after that. You've been acting strange for weeks. You're so pale you're almost grey. And…" she hesitated for a moment. "Your eyes. Vanya, have you seen your _eyes?_ I know the General had his sorcerers do something to you, but was it supposed to-" she broke off, gesturing vaguely at his face. "Are you sure it didn't go wrong somehow?"

Ivan tried to muffle his laugh and failed. "No. No, it worked perfectly."

"Oh." His sister studied him for another moment, as if trying to see some other change beyond his freakishly inhuman eyes. Were they worse than the Thuringian pilot's magically altered eyes had been, he wondered, or did it just seem that way because they no longer looked like his own? "What was supposed to do?"

The clicking and whispering sounded almost like laughter for a moment. 

When he saw the confused concern on Katushya's face, Ivan realized that he was the one who was laughing. And he couldn't make himself stop.

"He said it would… make me stronger," he gasped out, between paroxysms. "Harder to kill. In- invulnerable. And it did, it did, because you can't kill something that isn't alive. You can't kill something without a heart."

"Vanya." Katushya had moved closer, and was guiding him to the bed, one hand on his arm. "Everyone feels like that, eventually, in State Security. You can't be tenderhearted in this business." She pushed him down until he was sitting, and went to fetch the vodka bottle he kept tucked into his clothes trunk. Natalia must have told her about it. Or she might have simply guessed. Katushya had always been able to find his hiding places when they were children.

She thrust the bottle into his hands; after seven years in the Tsar's service, she knew better than to bother to fetch cups. "We all needed a break after Bjarmaland. I'm so sorry they sent you to command that clean-up squad yesterday. They should have sent someone else."

The vodka burned the inside of his throat going down. He couldn't remember the last time he'd drunk any. Gradually, his hysterical laughter died down into something more like sobs, and he was able to make himself stop.

"No," he managed, after a few moments. Katushya's hand was still on his arm, gentle, as if he were still the little brother she'd looked after. "They sent the right person. It didn't bother me at all. I was glad to do it."

And then he told her. About the General's experiments, the rift, and the Deep Ones on the other side of it. About what the sorcerers had taken from him, and what they'd replaced it with.

"They can't really have—" She shook her head. "Not even magic's that powerful. Maybe they just told you they'd cut it out."

"This is different from normal magic," he told her. "That's the entire point."

She still didn't believe him – he could see it in the way she watched him, that same patient look she'd gotten when they were children and he'd tried to explain how a broken plate or unfinished chore was entirely Natalia's fault.

The high collar of his uniform tunic was still unfastened. Ivan undid the buttons down the front of the tunic, then unbuttoned his shirt as well, pulling it open to show her the scar.

The horror on Katushya's face was oddly similar to the prison guard's face when Ivan had smiled at him. Before he could stop her, she reached out and touched the top edge of the scar, her fingers hot against his skin.

Ivan flinched back. 

"Gods, Vanya," she breathed. She pulled her hand back, as if afraid to touch him any further. "Did I hurt you?"

He shook his head, then took another swallow of vodka. His hands were still shaking, he noticed idly. He was supposed to have been immune to fear and pain; the General had all but promised him. "I don't have a heartbeat anymore. I can hear them whispering in my head. He promised it would make me stronger, and it has, but… I don't feel right."

Katushya was still staring at the scar. "They really-" she broke off, reaching for him again, and then hesitated. "May I?"

Ivan nodded, then forced himself to hold still while she laid her palm flat over the center of his chest, feeling for the heartbeat that wasn't there anymore. 

The silence stretched out between them, and he could see the moment when she realized that he'd been telling the truth by the way her face suddenly went blank.

She almost snatched up his wrist, fumbling for the pulse there, and then looked relieved when she found it. It still beat there, and in his throat, even though his blood had no heart to pump it. "See?" Katushya held his wrist up. "You do have a pulse." She let go of him and looked away for a moment, then said, quietly, "Vanya, these whispers… "

"I'm not imagining it," he protested. It probably sounded crazy to her; she hadn't been down to the tunnels, hadn't seen the rift, or felt the Deep Ones' presence. "The General showed me my heart, afterwards. It was still beating." The details came back to him as he spoke – it had been inside a jar, suspended in a faintly-glowing purple liquid.

He hadn't remembered that before. What else had he forgotten?

Katushya stared at him, her gaze flicking briefly to his eyes, then going back to the scar on his chest as if drawn there. "That kind of power…" she said slowly.

He nodded. "It's why the General needed the statue, the whole reasons he's here in Kholmagorsk in the middle of winter instead of south in Voloskaya. It could win the war for us, destroy all our enemies."

Still staring at him, Katushya sat down on the bed next to him hard enough to make the thin mattress creak. "I don't-" she started, and then shook her head. "What if it stops working? What will happen to you?"

Most likely he'd die. Ivan wasn't sure he wanted to think too hard about the alternative. "There are larger concerns than me here, Katushya. The Deep Ones could destroy our enemies for us, or our allies," for what those 'allies' were worth – the General had been right when he said that half of them were simply waiting for Thembria to weaken – "or they could destroy us, the way they did the Anostans. I don't think it matters to them."

He should tell the General, he thought again, and told Katushya so.

She shook her head, lips pressed together in a frown. "You can't tell him you're having doubts, Vanya. General Winter isn't the kind of man who wants to hear about doubts, not right now. They reprimanded and dismissed the director of the Ministry of Foreign Trade last month for being a Thuringian sympathizer, and had his entire senior staff reassigned, except for the ones who'd denounced him. The political climate is-"

"I know that," he interrupted. "You don't understand. I can hear them." Even now, sitting on his bed with the vodka bottle in his hand and Katushya perched next to him, he could hear clicks and whispers that were almost words, quiet enough that he might have thought he was imagining them if he didn't know better. Worse, he could _feel_ them, a hollow, hungry ache inside him that remembered the bodies piled in the square and the smell of smoke and blood and wanted more. "The general thinks we can use them, that they'll help us. I don't… I think they're using us."

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Then Katushya reached over and started to rebutton his shirt, careful to avoid touching the scar. 

"You'll do what must be done, then," she said. "But don't forget, he used you as sacrifice. You're disposable to him; we all are." 

Ivan shook his head. "He meant it as a reward." The General could have given his heart to the Deep Ones instead of simply removing it – something which, according to the sorcerers, would have allowed them to consume his soul and turn him into an obedient puppet – but instead he had kept it himself, had smiled at him, had even clapped him on the shoulder before stepping back to let the sorcerers work. He wouldn't have done that if he hadn't valued Ivan's loyalty and initiative over his obedience.

"Be careful, Vanya. You can't do anything for anyone if you're dead."

***

 

The fish were neatly packed in crates filled with ice, already stacked and waiting by the dock so that all Alfred and Matthew had to do was load them into the back of the Eagle, where they would melt and leak fishy-smelling water all over the cargo space.

Carcosa had indeed boasted a magic-worker, but his refrigeration spells had been insanely expensive, and he wasn't strong enough to completely guarantee them, anyway, so Matthew had gotten the cargo hold waterproofed instead. They'd see if it worked.

Arthur would have been able to-

Alfred cut off that line of thought and hoisted another crate up toward Matthew, who grabbed it and muscled it into the open door of the cargo hold. His brother backed up, pulling it inside, and then disappeared from view for a minute while he tied the crate down.

"Are you putting it over to the left?"

"Yes," Matthew called from inside the plane, "I'm putting it over to the left. I know what I'm doing, Al."

"If the weight's not evenly distributed-" Alfred defended.

"Do you want to get in here and do this?"

Someone was cranky today.

He hefted another crate – the next to last one – and went to hand it across to Matthew. This time, when he let it go, Matthew fumbled it, and Alfred lunged to grab hold of it again before the crate could fall into the gap between the edge of the pier and the Eagle's fuselage.

"Fuck, Matty, watch what you're doing!" he burst out, nearly dropping the crate himself as he took its weight again.

"You let go before I had it!" Matthew protested.

"I did not!"

He practically shoved the crate back into his brother's hands, imagining it splitting open and showering Matthew with ice and fish. 

Matthew reared back with it, tragically non-fish-covered, and Alfred went to fetch the last crate.

As he bent down to pick it up, he heard a distant rumbling noise, followed by a series of sharp cracks and pops almost like gunshots, far away but very clear.

Oh, shit. Automatically, he turned to look toward the highest point of the island, where Carcosa's long dormant volcano lay sleeping under its thick blanket of jungle. It looked peaceful, silhouetted against a perfectly clear sky. He squinted, trying to see if there was even a trace of smoke near the summit, and just as he determined that there was nothing there, he heard the sound of distant explosions again.

Was it Ninguaria? It was miles away, but they said that when Maxorata's volcano had blown its top off, you could hear it on all the neighboring islands. And when the central island had blown itself off the map all those years ago, they had heard the explosion in Ancient Ionia and Karkar.

"Look," Matthew said from behind him. "Airships at seven o' clock."

They were easy to spot, enough so that Alfred felt like an idiot for not seeing them before. Two of them made a distant pair of smudges on the horizon, surrounded by a thin haze of smoke. One of the long cigar shapes – too long to be any of the airships native to the archipelago – had a tiny dot of red on its side.

It was too far away to make out the Thuringian blood eagle, but there was nothing else it could have been.

The war had come to the Southern Archipelago

***

Carcosa didn't have a bar so much as it did a combination general store and cantina (which, after the tradition of Archipelagan bars, would also hold your letters for you). The owner hadn't sprung for a weather ward; if anything, it was hotter inside than it was outside.

Arthur set his half-empty glass back down and wiped his fingers – wet with condensation – off on his trouser leg. He'd come in to Fernando’s Cantina and Bait Shop hoping that a few drinks would make him feel less restless, but it didn't seem to be working.

He hadn't slept well in weeks, not since the night he'd been woken by whatever the Thembrians had done, and his skin had been almost literally itching since the airship battle earlier.

It could be all in his head, he told himself for what was probably the dozenth time. Yao didn't seem uncomfortable. But she had more self-control than he did, and would probably refuse to show weakness in front of him and her little sister, regardless.

It could be all in his head. The gods knew, there was enough for him to worry about at the moment that he didn't need supernatural reasons for insomnia. There were airships fighting within sight of the archipelago now. The war was no longer something happening elsewhere, and Arthur hadn't received any communications from Albia in weeks. 

His Albian contacts were normally pretty hands-off, but after the Thembrians had abandoned their consulate in Ninguaria with Porta di Vulcani still smoldering behind them, he'd expected some kind of word. The situation had changed; the Archipelago was on shaky diplomatic ground with Thembria, something likely to push them into the arms of the Thuringians, and with more Anostan artifacts still lying submerged where the island of Anostus had once been, Thembria was not going to keep their attention focused solely on Bjarmaland and Anatolia much longer. The archipelago had no military – they barely had a centralized government – and since Ionia had been absorbed into the Thuringrike and lost their influence over the islands, they had been, if not technically an Albian possession, something of a de facto one.

The ability to trade with both warring powers by directing shipping through the archipelago had allowed Albia to maintain her commercial ties to both the Thuringrike and to Thembria's satellite states despite both empires' efforts to attack one another's main shipping routes. A properly united archipelagan nation might not maintain that convenient neutrality, and a Southern Archipelago occupied by the Thembrians or allied with the Thuringrike would be even worse. Even if the Thembrians didn't seize the archipelago, they'd be back too look for more artifacts, and there was no doubt in Arthur's mind that they would find them.

Whatever they had done with the original artifact, it had caused such a vast surge of magical power that Arthur had felt it from thousands of miles away. And since then, nothing, unless one counted the nightmares and the heavy sense of dread he'd felt since then. There had been things sleeping under the archipelago for millennia, since ancient Anostus had fallen; every mage who'd been foolhardy enough – or stuck under the command of a smuggler captain desperate enough – to sail across the center of the archipelago knew that. 

He was very much afraid that the Thembrians might have woken one of them up, or at least tried to.

That was a line of thinking that required a lot more alcohol before he took it any further.

Just as Arthur was contemplating another drink here and now versus the fact that Kiku was guarding the ship and Vash was still recovering and that left only Yao or the kids to get him back to the Ariel if he actually got drunk here instead of back on the ship, the screaming started.

***

The miniscule amount of floor space inside the Eagle was not quite long enough for Alfred to stretch out fully, and when he lay flat on his back, his shoulders brushed the edges of the seats, but it was better than trying to sleep _in_ one of said seats.

Matthew, whose job it was to keep track of who'd gotten the floor last time around and thus whose turn it was to sleep where, had admitted that tonight was Alfred's shot at the floor. He supposed he ought to be grateful he got the better sleeping spot, but if it weren't for the stupid Thembrians and their stupid airship making it too dangerous to fly out (technically, he supposed the Thuringrike had contributed, too, but the Thembrians were backstabbing arsonists who'd nearly ruined his business, so he'd decided to give most of the blame to them), he and Matthew would have been most of the way back to Ninguaria by now, where they'd have a hotel room waiting for them. A hotel room with beds, mosquito netting, and showers.

Instead, he was stuck on an island too small to have its own hotel, trying to sleep on five square feet of metal flooring.

This better not become a regular occurrence, or Eagle Transport would be screwed.

Hel take the Thembrians, anyway. Or Poseidon, or Hades, or somebody.

He had just started to doze off when something bumped gently against the side of the Eagle's hull. _Fish,_ he thought, and closed his eyes again.

And then whatever it was thudded against the side of the plane again, and Alfred groaned and sat up, push his glasses up to rub at his eyes.

He was going to have to go outside and see what it was, to make sure it wasn't a loose boat or crab float that was going to bang against the Eagle all night and keep him awake, or, worse, damage the plane.

Long experience let him climb from the open door in the side of the Eagle's fuselage – it let the mosquitoes in, but if they'd closed themselves up inside a metal box all night, they'd have steamed to death – onto the edge of the pier without falling into the water, despite the lack of light. Outside the plane, it was brighter, both moonlight from overhead and lights from the harbor reflecting off the water.

Still, he had to squint at the dark shape floating in the water next to the Eagle for a long moment before it resolved itself into something recognizable.

He would later firmly deny that he shrieked. Yelped, maybe, but only in surprise. Anyone would have, if they'd found a human corpse bobbing up and down in the water right next to their aircraft.

He'd seen dead bodies before. Including dead bodies floating in the water. Granted, until that night in Porta di Vulcani it had always been drowned fisherman after a ship had gone down, but there had also been the burned, waterlogged corpses from the time that airship had been struck by lightning and blown up, and this wasn't as bad as that. This guy still had all his limbs.

Where had he come from? They ought to report it to somebody; he'd have family on the island who'd want to bury him.

Someone out in the harbor screamed, the sound echoing off the water. Alfred wheeled around, staring out into the darkness; a handful of boats were out, fishing for squid with electric torches. It was too close to shore for the squids' larger cousins to have come up seeking a meal, and all but the biggest of the sharks went after swimmers, not boats. What was—

He turned back at the sound of splashing behind him, and saw a pale, wet hand groping at the edge of the pier.

Gods, the man was alive! Alfred automatically leaped forward to help the man out of the water – he was wearing a uniform, he must have swum all the way to shore from the wreckage of one of the airships, no wonder he'd just been floating there like the dead from exhaustion – and grabbed the airman's wrist. 

He'd been braced to take the man's entire weight, expecting to have to haul him up onto the pier. Instead, he practically flew out of the water, lunging for Alfred like a shark.

Alfred reared back as teeth snapped at his throat, and landed on his butt on the pier with the airman on top of him.

He was soaking wet and smelled like dead fish. Alfred tried to buck him off, shoving at the man's weight and then, when that failed, punching him in the ribs.

Teeth snapped at his face again, and cold, wet hands closed like a vise around his throat, impossibly strong.

Alfred grabbed the man's wrist and pulled at them desperately, unable to budge them, and tried to knee his attacker in the groin, but he must have missed because there was no reaction, not even a grunt.

His lungs burned, screaming for air, and his ears were starting to ring. He clawed at the hands around his throat, kicking wildly at the pier, and then, in desperation, as his vision started to go dark and spotty, jabbed his thumb into the man's eye until something squished disgustingly.

The man didn't seem to feel it, continuing to strangle Alfred with inhuman determination.

There was a dull thud, and suddenly he could breathe again.

Alfred's head thunked back down against the dock as he sucked air in through his aching throat. His vision cleared to see Matthew standing over them, a wrench in one hand.

His brother swing the wrench like a cricket bat, slamming it directly into the side of the airman's skull. It should have knocked him cold or at least stunned him, but instead he turned on Matthew with an incoherent snarl.

"What in Hel?" Matthew exclaimed, backing away and swinging the wrench in front of him.

Alfred scrambled to his feet, still gasping for air. "I don't know," he wheezed. "I thought he was dead. And then he wasn't, and then he just came at me."

As he spoke, the man lunged at him again, hands out and reaching, and how in the name of all the gods was a half-dead near-drowning victim this _strong_?

"Stop," he pleaded. "Please, we—I was trying to _help_ you."

The man grabbed at him, clawing at his clothing, and Matthew swung the wrench again.

"Leave. My. Brother. Alone."

The man grabbed Matthew by the wrist and ripped the wrench out of his hand, tossing it aside, and Alfred lunged for his blind side before those wet, fishy hands could lock around his brother's throat.

Something dark and wet was oozing from the man's eye socket, but it hadn't even slowed him down. 

Maybe this would.

Alfred kicked at the man's kneecap with all his strength, and actually heard the crunching sound as it gave way. The man lurched to the side as his leg folded under him, and Matthew shoved him back into the water.

Alfred swallowed hard, feeling sick, and not just from the ache in his throat. His hand would never be clean again. He had _eye goo_ under his thumbnail. He'd never done this kind of damage to another human being.

The man splashed and flailed, and then those terrible white hands were grabbing for the edge of the pier again.

Alfred dove inside the Sea Eagle and looked around desperately for his gun. Where had he put it? In his carpetbag? Why was it always packed away in a suitcase whenever he needed it?

It seemed to take an eternity to unzip the bag and pull the weapon out, all the while expecting the man to come up behind him and grab him by the throat again.

There were bullets in it this time, because he'd learned his lesson in Porta di Vulcani. Alfred flicked the safety off, cocked it, and scrambled to his feet, almost throwing himself back out the plane's open door.

Miraculously, he managed to land on the pier instead of missing it and falling into the water, and equally miraculously, the airman hadn't brutally murdered Matthew in the handful of seconds he'd been gone.

He planted his feet, shifted the gun to a two-handed grip, and pointed it at their attacker, who was limping menacingly toward Matthew while his brother backed away, waving the wrench violently in front of him.

"Stop!" he shouted. "I have a gun." How did you say that in Thembrian? Hel and Hades, how did you say it in crazy? "I have a gun," he repeated, in the Armorican-Ionian creole that was still the main language in more isolated parts of the archipelago. He probably wouldn't understand that, either, but it was the only other language Alfred spoke. "I'll shoot you!" he warned, switching back to Albian.

The man seemed to hesitate for a moment, then turned toward Alfred, moving far too fast for a half-drowned crash survivor with a dislocated kneecap and one gouged-out eye. He ought to be in shock. Maybe he was in shock and that was why he didn't react to injuries. Maybe Alfred had maimed and disfigured a traumatized injured man who didn't understand what was happening.

"Stop," he shouted again. "Stay away!"

The man lunged at him, teeth bared and hands clawing, and Alfred pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit the man in the upper torso, near the shoulder, and knocked him back half a step. And then, impossibly, instead of grabbing at his shoulder and collapsing, he kept coming.

Behind him, he could hear Matthew scrambling back into the Sea Eagle, cursing frantically. Alfred fired again, this time aiming for the man's good knee, and was mildly impressed with himself when he actually hit it.

The airman finally – _finally_ – went down, and for a moment, Alfred was too relieved to feel guilty.

Then both relief and guilt vanished as the man started crawling toward him, dragging his useless legs across the pier like something out of a horror pulp come to life.

The Eagle's engine coughed and sputtered and then caught. Matthew was the best copilot ever, he thought. The best brother ever. Getting the fuck out of here was the best idea anyone had ever had.

And then, as the, the _thing_ crawled across the pier toward him, battered and broken and bleeding from two bullet holes and still, impossibly, moving, Alfred had an even better idea.

Before he could really think about what he was doing, he dropped the useless gun to the pier and bent down to grab the airman by the upper arms. Ignoring the hands that grabbed at his clothing and the teeth snapping at his face, he hauled the man up and threw him bodily toward the nearer of the Eagle's two propellers.

The throaty whine of the engine changed to a series of rapid, stuttering thuds, and blood sprayed everywhere. 

After a moment, the Eagle's engine resumed its normal rhythm. Alfred reached up to wipe at the dark spots covering his glasses and felt hot, sticky liquid smear under his fingertips.

He took a deep breathe, trying to steady himself, and instantly regretted it as the taste/smell of blood filled his mouth. Blood and pieces of flesh were sliding slowly down the side of the Eagle's fuselage and into the water, and as he watched, a piece of _something_ fell from the leading edge of the wing. The sound it made when it hit the water was drowned out by the Eagle's engine.

He dropped to his knees and threw up over the side of the pier.

He kept heaving even after his stomach was empty, bile burning in his abused throat. Finally, he blinked tears out of his eyes and lifted his head.

The harbor looked bizarrely unchanged. Lights still bobbed out on the water where oblivious fisherman were using them to lure squid to the surface, and the two men in the nearest boat were on their feet struggling to haul in a net.

He blinked, wiping at his smeared glasses again – don't think about what they're smeared with, he told himself, don't – and the fishermen suddenly no longer looked like they were hauling on a net. They were grappling with each other, both on their feet in a violently swaying boat, the electric torch waving wildly through the air as the fisherman tried to beat his attacker in the head with it. 

Even over the sound of the Eagle's engine, Alfred could hear screaming, and as he watched, one of the boats farther out suddenly flipped over, its occupants vanishing from sight.

Gods, there were more of them.

***

Arthur had followed the screams and aura of dark magic down to the harbor to find what looked like a street brawl. Sailors, fishermen, and dock workers were grappling with a handful of men in Thembrian uniforms, all of whom fairly reeked of the same cold, damp, faintly slimy power that had infused the stolen Anostan statue.

So. This was what the Thembrians had done with it.

Whatever ‘this’ was.

As he watched, one of the Thembrian airman stumbled back to his feet, blood pouring from a fishing-knife-inflicted gash that should have had him on his knees, clutching his belly. Another took a blow directly to the ear without so much as blinking or shaking his head. Before Arthur could move close enough to stop him, he seized the man who had struck him and snapped his neck with one hand.

The man dropped his victim’s limp body and looked up, his eyes gleaming purple in the flickering light of the harbor’s one electric lamp. 

Arthur drew his painfully underpowered .22 and fired at him, aiming for center mass. It wouldn’t kill him, not at this distance, but it should—

Do absolutely nothing, apparently.

Working magic was a little bit more of a challenge without either a spell circle or spilled blood, but after so many years of working with anti-combustion wards, lighting things on fire came easily.

He drew the glyph for flame on the side of his pistol with a fingertip, then raised it and fired at the airman again, pouring magic into the shot.

This bullet had no more impact than the one before it, but when the flames sprang into life a half-second afterward, they were considerably more effective.

Two of the other airman froze, their heads swiveling toward Arthur in unison. He only had (?) bullets left; he needed to find another way to transmit the spell, because fighting hand-to-hand with magically-enhanced shock troops was the last thing his only barely-healed side needed.

“Captain, duck!”

Long experience had Arthur diving for the ground without even bothering to look for where Xiao Chun’s voice had come from. A small, dark shape sailed over his head and struck the nearest Thembrian, exploding on impact with the perfect timing Xiao Chun’s little explosives always had.

This one was considerably more powerful than usual. The concussion hit his ears like a slap, and a charred, severed hand landed in the muddy street a few feet away. The fingers were twitching, in a way that owed a lot more to the power saturating the pieces of somehow-still-living flesh than it did to nerve reflex.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded as he scrambled to his feet. She ought to have been back on the ship, where it was safe from Thembrians, possessed and possibly undead or otherwise. “Get back to the _Ariel_.” 

“Kiku and Lili are guarding the ship,” she told him, hefting another small explosive in one hand. Its fuse was already smoking. “My sister wanted to come see where the dark magic was coming from.”

Arthur turned, following the direction of Xiao Chun’s nod, and saw Yao emerging from the shadows between two buildings. She was carrying a short sword Arthur recognized as Kiku’s off-hand back-up weapon, and looked prepared to simply wade into the fight.

He opened his mouth to comment acidly that she was about to get herself killed, and then a gurgling scream dragged his attention back to the fight.

He and Xiao Chun had destroyed two of the possessed Thembrians, and a pair of fishermen had a second one on the ground and were hacking at him with the biggest pair of bait knives Arthur had ever seen, but more were already splashing ashore. If they had survived the destruction of the Thembrian airship—and he couldn’t think where else they could have come from – then they had swum over a mile to reach land.

It was hard to tell in the dim light, but several of them looked like they already sported burns, and one was missing an arm.

Not that the injury seemed to slow him down any. He lunged toward one of the fishermen, his luminous purple eyes holding nothing human in them, and Arthur shot him in the chest.

He didn’t scream when the flames caught, only snarled and lurched toward Arthur, ignoring the salt water only a few feet away that could have put the fire out.

Yao made a throwing motion, and something small flashed as it winged toward the burning man. 

He toppled to the ground, still smoldering, and Arthur saw a thin, silver scalpel embedded in his throat.

The body didn’t even twitch, and he could almost see the magic that filled it flickering and dying.

Another one charged him, and then another, and within moments Arthur was down to his final enchanted bullet. He had a sword back on the _Ariel_ , for use on the rare occasions when they actually boarded another ship, but that wasn’t going to do him any good at the moment.

Trusting Xiao Chun to have his back for the moment it would take, he crouched down and yanked the scalpel from the dead Thembrian’s throat. It was uncomfortably hot in his hand, almost painful to hold, and he spared a moment to hope that the fire might have killed any bacteria from the corpse before slicing it into the palm of his right hand.

For quick and dirty magic, nothing beat human blood, especially your own.

Now he could call up fire to engulf the Thembrians without sigils or the need to use a bullet as a vector. Unfortunately, without any bullets left, he’d have to touch them in order to do it.

Yao seemed to have decided on similar tactics – that, or she’d run out of scalpels to throw – and was engaging their attackers in close combat. In the instant Arthur had to spare to glance at her, he saw her slice one man’s hand off at the wrist – it didn’t twitch when it hit the ground – and then launch herself at a Thembrian looming over Xiao Chun. She kicked him in the sternum, struck him in the throat with stiffened fingers, and then caught him behind the ear with other hand, almost too quickly for Arthur to follow.

The Thembrian collapsed, the magic that animated him fading away.

“How are you doing that, woman?” he demanded. 

Yao paused for a moment to spare him a glance. “I spent many years learning how to kill things with magic,” she said. Then she lunged and, with perfect form, drove Kiku’s sword into a Thembrian’s chest.

Wang Yao was barely five feet tall, and until a few weeks ago had spent all her time running a medical clinic; she shouldn’t be able to move like that, kill like that. Much as he didn’t like to admit it, she was better than Arthur was, maybe even better than Kiku.

What had she been before coming to the Archipelago?

He could wonder about that later, when nothing was trying to kill him.

Not about to let Yao show him up in front of his crew – even if said crew consisted only of her younger sister – Arthur moved for the closest source of familiar dark, damp-feeling power, bloody hand extended.

What seemed like ages later, he surveyed the collection of smoldering and twitching bodies and tried to resist the urge to simply sit down where he was until he could get his breath back.

His side hurt, and he’d been overly enthusiastic in the amount of power he’d spent calling up fire. Part of the closest dock was going to have to be rebuilt. Hopefully, the locals wouldn’t want him to pay for it, the way Yao was still demanding he do for her clinic.

After long moment spent with his hand pressed against his side, staring at his feet and trying to breathe slowly, Arthur looked back up and saw two figures picking their way through the corpses.

For an instant, he didn’t recognize them – though he could feel that they were untainted by whatever the Thembrians had called up, and therefore not a threat – and then they got closer, and he registered their height at the same moment that he saw light glinting off the frames of two pairs of glasses.

He probably should have been surprised, but Thembrian airman animated by magic like so many puppets climbing up out of the water and trying to kill everything they saw with their bare hands had used up his ability to feel surprise for the moment.

Of course the Jones brothers were here. Where else would they be?

Matthew’s too-long hair was wet and plastered to his head, and he was clutching a wrench in one hand. Next to him, Alfred was equally wet, mud spattered all over him from head to foot, even covering one lens of his glasses. 

No, not mud. There was no mud along the shoreline here, only sand and rock.

“Are you all right? Where are you hurt?” He rushed forward, automatically reaching for Alfred, only to have the other man wave him off.

“I’m fine. It’s not my blood.” Alfred glanced down at himself for a moment, making a face at the gore covering his arms and hands, and then let out a semi-hysterical sounding giggle. “There was a Thembrian strike. Like a bird strike, only a lot bigger.”

Matthew winced visibly. “It’s not funny. One of us is going to have to clean the propeller mount.”

Arthur stepped back, feeling suddenly embarrassed at his over-reaction. Of course Alfred was covered in blood. Half the people still standing were covered in blood, thanks to the need to literally hack the Thembrians to pieces in order to stop them.

The only person still approaching clean was Xiao Chun, who hadn’t needed to get in close to the possessed men in order to take them down.

“I should have known you’d be here,” Arthur said, trying to regain his composure. He pulled himself up a little straighter, despite the twinge in his side. “Whenever there’s a disaster, you always show up in the middle of it.”

“One of them attacked our plane,” Alfred said. “And then we realized there were more. So of course we came.” He gave Arthur a slightly wobbly grin. “Looks like you owe us twice now.”

“For what?”

“Saving you, of course.”

He was too tired for this, Arthur decided. And his hand was starting to throb where he’d sliced it open. “Thank you, Alfred. You’re a true hero.”

Alfred kept grinning, apparently immune to sarcasm. “You’re welcome.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Ivan’s “strange omega shape” pupils are based on the spectacularly freaky-looking [cuttlefish eye](https://www.google.com/search?q=cuttlefish+eye&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=EoBUU-_rHpPTsATK1YG4CA&ved=0CCsQsAQ&biw=1036&bih=617).


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our apologies for the ridiculously long gap between the last chapter and this one.

Somehow, despite Alfred’s repeated vows never to set foot on Arthur’s damn airship again, they all ended up going back to the _Ariel_.

At least it had a wash room and shower onboard, albeit one with a limited water supply. He didn’t want to think about what kind of things had dried in his hair. He’d taken his glasses off and determinedly not looked at the drain during the much-too-short five minutes he’d spent scrubbing all the blood off (after five minutes, the shower automatically shut itself off, either from magic or through some kind of timing mechanism).

Putting the same clothes back on afterwards – still wet where he had tried and failed to wash out the bloodstains – had been disgusting, but since every single member of Arthur’s crew was ridiculously tiny, there was nothing clean on board that he or Matthew could borrow. Not even a spare shirt to replace his own completely unsalvageable one.

Now, sitting at the table in the _Ariel’_ s tiny dining hall, Alfred made a face down at his cup of tea and tried to ignore the clammy feel of his wet socks and the mildly exposed feeling of sitting there shirtless in front of a whole room full of people; he had goosebumps on his arms, and he was pretty sure Lili had giggled at him. Tea was an Albian tradition that hadn’t really spread to the archipelago, not the way Ionian coffee had, but Arthur seemed to have held on to that part of his past. Up at altitude, hot drinks were appealing in a way they weren’t down in the humid heat at sea level.

Arthur, he noticed, had poured some kind of liquor into the tea in his own cup, but hadn’t offered anyone else any. Typically selfish of him – they probably all could have used some. Especially Vash, who was sitting pale and stiff in his chair with one arm wrapped around his middle.

At least he was alive; Alfred had worried about that a little, despite not knowing him very well. After you carried someone’s unconscious body up a rope ladder, you tended to take a general interest in their continued welfare.

“Did you really fight walking corpses?” Peter demanded, hanging over the back of Arthur’s chair. “Xiao Chun says they were all dead but got up again.”

“They weren’t quite dead,” Yao said. She folded her hands together on the table in front of her and gave Xiao Chun a severe look. “Don’t exaggerate, little sister.”

Xiao Chun slouched down into her chair and shrugged one shoulder. “They looked pretty dead to me.”

“No,” Alfred countered. “They were definitely alive.” That first Thembrian had bled when he shot him. Dead men didn’t bleed. Or lunge out of the water at you like a shark and try to strangle you. “They were crazy, or maybe drugged somehow. They didn’t feel it when you hit them; they just kept coming at you.”

Crawling toward you with their kneecaps shattered and blood and fluid running from empty eye sockets, bleeding from a dozen wounds. Lurching up out of the harbor with missing limbs and burned clothing and clammy, fish-white faces and trying to kill everything they saw.

The kid didn’t need to know that, though. _Alfred_ didn’t need to know it.

“They were possessed,” Arthur cut in. “Well, not technically possessed; I don’t think there were actually demons or spirits of the dead inside them. But they were being controlled somehow. All of them were animated by the same magical power your Anostan relic was imbued with.”

“It wasn’t technically our statue,” Matthew started to say, but Vash spoke over him.

“I knew we should never have gotten involved with them.” He glowered at Alfred and Matthew, or maybe just at the room in general. Not very grateful, considering that Alfred had helped save him, but given that the Thembrians had practically gutted him, he probably had the right to be mad. 

Lili patted him on the shoulder. “We know you tried to stop them,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault they stole it.”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” Arthur said, while giving Alfred a look that conveyed very clearly that it was _his_ fault. “Whatever the Thembrians planned to do with the statue, they accomplished it weeks ago, and what we saw tonight was the result. And it isn’t going to end here. Those men were basically puppets, emptied of their will and filled up again with magic that kept them alive until every bit of their bodies was destroyed, and there were over two dozen of them. Do you have any idea how much power that takes?”

“A lot?” Alfred guessed.

“More than a single human being could channel without killing themselves,” Yao said.

That… was a lot.

“Or without killing someone else,” Arthur added, because this whole thing just wasn’t creepy enough already. He was looking at Alfred again, his eyes fixed on his bare chest.

Alfred sat up a little straighter and resisted the impulse to cross his arms over his chest; he had nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike some people, his arms and chest were broad and muscular, not pale and scrawny and weirdly delicate-looking.

Matthew had asked some question, he hadn’t heard what, and Yao and Arthur proceeded to explain that it was definitely, unquestionably connected to that stupid statue because they could ‘feel’ the magic involved.

Peter made a face. “This is like something out of _Incredible Tales_.”

“I know, right?” Alfred agreed. If he could go back in time – another pulp story favorite – and meet Sergeyevich all over again, he would tell him to swim to Ninguaria with his cursed statue of the living dead, and then maybe punched him in the face for good measure. Or taken the commission and then chucked the statue out of the Eagle in mid-flight, priceless archaeological treasure or not.

Those possessed airman had killed people, innocent fishermen and townspeople who’d still be alive if it weren’t for Imperial Thembria. The airmen had _been_ people, before sorcerers had done the gods knew what to them.

Done the gods knew what and used himself and Matthew to do it.

“So what do we do about this?” he demanded, cutting off whatever Kiku had been saying. “How do we stop them from making more of these things?”

The entire table turned to look at him.

“What? They used me and Matty to carry out their evil plan. We can’t let them get away with it! It’s our responsibility to stop them.”

“Hey,” Matthew protested, “when did I agree to that?” Alfred could tell he was only saying it for form’s sake, though. He’d seen those things tonight, too.

“Good.” Vash shifted carefully in his chair. “You can leave and get right on that.”

“We have to stop them,” Alfred repeated. “And you guys are all going to help us!”

This time, Arthur was definitely not staring at him because of his bare chest. “We are?” he asked dryly.

“Yes!”

Arthur sighed, and rubbed at his forehead between his eyebrows, looking pained. “We are,” he repeated. “Damn.”

***

“You’ll be pleased to know that the first round of sacrifices have proven even more successful in action than we had hoped,” the general informed him.

Ivan’s smile was automatic, despite the fact that this was going to make what he needed to tell the general more difficult. The cannon fodder created by feeding men’s hearts to the Deep Ones were perfectly obedient to orders and fiercely aggressive in battle, devoid of any kind of self-preservation. Devoid, also, of any kind of independent thought. The first division had been sent to the Ionian Sea, where skirmishes with the Thembrian navy were more of a mild inconvenience than a significant strategic concern, just in case the new troops had proven less than reliable in battle.

A loyal Thembrian would not wish for those worries not to have been proven false.

“That’s good to hear, general, sir, but it is still early to be sure of overall success,” Ivan temporized.

General Winter actually smiled slightly, something he’d almost never done before they had opened the rift. “You are too modest, Podkolpovnik Braginsky. Your own service since being transformed has been exemplary. The way you dealt with those political prisoners in particular; your initiative has been noted.”

Once, Ivan would have felt the urge to wince at that. The fact that he didn’t feel that discomfort now was even more disturbing than his previous regrets would have been. “I was worried that I might have overstepped my bounds,” he said. “That I had put the urgings of the Deep Ones ahead of the good of the state.” Dangerous, to admit that, but what other option did he have?

“Not at all,” the general assured him. “Far from it, in fact.” And before Ivan could press the matter further, he went on, “As I said, your actions have been noted. You’re being reassigned to the western front, Braginsky. I’ll be sorry to lose your assistance here, but we need men of your initiative and abilities on the front lines.”

It was what he and Natasha - and all the rest of his subordinates – had been waiting for for a month. Useful, clean action against foreign enemies, not the distasteful if necessary task of dealing with internal traitors and provincial uprisings. No more temporary office in an unused storeroom, no more support staff who’d spent their entire careers safely away from the battlefield making gestures against ill fortune at their backs and calling them butchers. Kholmagorsk was technically part of the western front as well, but this far north there was no action for ground troops, only airship raids and the odd Thuringian spy.

Maybe if he went far enough away from the rift, he wouldn’t be able to hear the Deep Ones anymore.

They would still be there, though. Hungry and waiting.

“But even the best commander is only as good as his men,” the general was saying. “You are to pick two of your best subordinates to undergo the same transformation you’ve gone through.” He shook his head slight, his long, stern face looking almost rueful for a moment. “I only wish I were a younger man, so that I could have the same procedure performed on myself, but the sorcerers claim I’m too old for my heart to survive the extraction.”

For half a moment, Ivan thought of Laurinaitis, who wasn’t cut out for State Security work and wasn’t going to make it in the long run if Bjarmaland was any indication. Having his heart removed would change that, remove all that squeamishness and replace it with purpose and certainty.

He caught himself reaching up to rub at his chest, and forced his hand back to his side. “Are you certain, sir? We’ve only just-“ he broke off, aware that wording this the wrong way could cost him his position. “We know so little about the Deep Ones. The gods beyond the rift. What if they’re simply using us? They’re so hungry…” he trailed off, words failing him under the weight of the general’s frown.

“And we shall feed them. This kind of hesitancy isn’t like you, podkolpovnik,” he add, a hint of censure in his tone. “You of all people should know how much we stand to gain from this arrangement.”

“Yes, general, sir, “Ivan agreed, and then, steeling himself, “and also how much we stand to lose.” It was perilously close to criticism of his superior, but he couldn’t simply let the general forge on into potential disaster without at least trying to warn him.

“The sorcerers and scientists both assure me that the portal is stable,” General Winter said. He sounded impatient now, and his strides had become more brisk; a shorter man than Ivan would have had to struggle to keep up without visible hast.

Since they were the ones who worked in the closest proximity to it, the scientists and sorcerers who maintained the portal would have more incentive to tell the truth about any potential problems than they would to lie in order to keep State Security happy. Which would have been reassuring if disasters like the Fall of Anostus were what Ivan was most worried about.

“The cost in lives necessary to keep it functioning is minimal compared to the security the Deep Ones’ power can grant us. If they require few Thembrian souls as well as the souls of our enemies, it will be a small and worthwhile sacrifice to make.” He said this with a finality that indicated that this topic of conversation was over, and that Ivan should keep any further doubts to himself.

He followed the general into the cavern without speaking further. Presumably, it was still as cold down here as it had ever been; Ivan wouldn’t know.

The last time he’d come here, they had taken his heart. The last time he clearly recalled, anyway; he had vague memories of other visits, during the blank expanse of time after his transformation, but he wasn’t sure whether those memories were real or just his imagination.

As he stepped inside, the Deep Ones presence rolled over him like a wave, no longer a whisper along the edge of his mind but an overwhelming presence crushing down on him. He took a step toward the rift, almost overtaking the general before he recalled himself.

It would be so easy to give in to that call, to let them take over his will again and be freed from any further worry or need to make decisions. No fear, no pain, only numbness and implacable purpose.

Everything else inside the cavern faded into insignificance beside the glowing beacon of the rift. It was visibly larger than before – only by a little, but enough for him to tell that it was growing – and after a few moments of looking into the purple-black glow, he could make out shapes and movement inside it. There was something visible beyond it now, a vague and distorted impression of something unimaginably huge, writhing slowly like a mass of serpents or tentacles. 

Hunger hollowed out his insides, stronger than ever before, not just for death and destruction, but for everything that existed on this side of the rift. All the life waiting to be consumed, all the deep waters of the oceans waiting to be colonized, all the destructive potential of a world with a live, volcanic heart waiting to be unleashed. For a moment, he had an impression of countless dead worlds, floating lifeless in a chill and empty void, and the weight of an unimaginable stretch of time spent moving from one to the next.

Ivan froze, simultaneously wanting both to move closer to the rift and to run as far away from it as possible.

“Podkolpovnik Braginsky?”

Ivan let out an unbecoming little yelp, and then belatedly realized that he’d been standing motionless a few feet from the Faraday cage for what had probably been several minutes. “Can’t you feel them, sir?” His voice cracked on the words, and he pressed a hand over his mouth to muffle the nervous little laugh that wanted to escape.

“Exhilarating, isn’t it?” General Winter smiled faintly, the expression looking as out of place as it always did on his grim, angular face. “All that power and possibility.”

Ivan shook his head, feeling small for the first time since he’d been very young as he stared up at the rift and the Things beyond it. “All that hunger,” he half-whispered. “They’re going to destroy everything.” Deep inside, part of him was actually eager at the thought of it, even as the rest of him recoiled from it.

“We have to stop this, General, sir.” The words came out before he could think about them, try to mold them into something more respectful and circumspect. “We have to close it.” He was pretty sure he himself would die if they did, but that might be better than whatever was going to happen to him if they left it open. A loyal soldier was supposed to be prepared to die for Thembria, he thought, and then forced down the hysterical laughter that wanted to come spilling out.

“Did I not say I wanted to hear no more of this?” the general said icily.

“Yes, sir, but-“

“Even the most exemplary service only gets you so much leeway, podkolpovnik. I will hear no more disloyal protests on this topic. This project is too sensitive and important to allow one man to jeopardize it.” His voice softened, without losing any hint of the underlying chill. “Any other man, I would reprimand, or even have investigated for Thuringian or anarchist sympathies. You, I cannot, not anymore. If you become a liability, Braginsky, the only course of action open to us will be to feed your heart to the Deep Ones. I would regret having to do that, and not simply because your transition’s proven to be such a success.”

The apologies and promise to do better came automatically, as they always had.

Inside his head, the Deep Ones whispered and clicked their satisfaction.

***

Arthur put the finishing touches on his circle - chalk instead of metal inlay, but this was too volatile a spell to work in the engine room, even if it weren’t entirely unrelated to the ship’s wards – and used a small burst of magic to light the candle in the circle’s center. The dried blood he’d smeared onto the candle’s wick ignited, and the circle began to glow faintly as the wards worked into it activated.

They had all decided – some more grudgingly than others – that whatever magic the Thembrians were working had to be stopped, but that was a little difficult when all they knew for certain about said magic was that it involved Anostan artifacts and presumably the same source of power that had destroyed Anostus. 

Arthur could recognize that much; everything that came out of the smoking sea was saturated in it, and the possessed Thembrians had reeked of it. However, that was little enough knowledge to work with.

Hopefully, some judiciously applied black magic would tell him more. And having some definite knowledge of the situation would save them all from having to listen to any more of Alfred’s ludicrous theories, most of which appeared to have come from horror pulps.

He probably ought to have consulted with Yao before trying this, but necromancy was technically forbidden in several countries, and with his luck, Hsian would turn out to be one of them and she’d try to stop him. Much better just to carry it out quietly and present his results as fait accompli. It was almost always easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

It wasn’t, after all, forbidden in the Southern Archipelago, because forbidding any form of magic would require having a real government significantly more powerful and on top of things than Ninguaria’s.

Arthur took a deep breath, lifted his hands, and began the ritual incantation. The circle glowed more brightly as he poured power into it, a beacon to summon one of the dead Thembrians’ souls from the afterlife.

It would be easier if he had some talisman from one of them, or better yet, a body part, but at the time, when they’d been hacking twitching corpses to pieces and burning them, the last thing he’d been thinking of was picking up a finger and sticking it in his pocket for later. Raw power was going to have to suffice in place of a link with a specific individual.

The temperature in his room dropped, and non-existent wind ruffled at his hair and clothing. It smelled of the inside of a cave, like damp stone and silence. 

The candle dimmed from yellow-orange to a tiny blue glow, steady instead of flickering, and a barely audible susurrus of noise whispered at the edge of his hearing.

It grew gradually louder, seeming to come from all around him, and he waited for it to resolve into words, into a single human voice. Instead, the noise became less and less recognizable, devolving into a series of incomprehensible clicking sounds before gradually dying away.

The wind vanished, cut off abruptly, and the candle began burning normally again, a cheerful yellow tongue of failure.

Arthur breathed out, a long sigh, and tried to think what he’d done wrong. Damn it, it should have worked. It had certainly _felt_ like it had worked. He had only worked necromancy a few time before, mostly during his training back in Albia, but when it had gone right, it had felt just like this – chthonic wind, the candle dying down, the faint pulse of his power echoing off something unseen. His call had been heard, the whispers had proven that much; there had been a vague sense of something simultaneously chillingly ruthless and utterly terrified, but nothing more, and then it had been abruptly cut off. Had the Thembrians been guarded against this possibility somehow? Had he not used enough power?

That had never been a problem before, but with some unknown force taking possession of the airmen’s bodies, it was possible their souls had been bound somehow. A more powerful summoning might be able to break through that, but it might also run the risk of summoning whatever it was that had been animating those not-quite-corpses.

He could still vividly remember his dreams of the warped, black-violet hel-portal opening beneath the archipelago, and though those had likely been symbolic rather than literal, it was still something he didn’t want to touch on too directly. The Anostans had, and they had blown the archipelago’s central island off the map.

Too much power, and _They_ might have taken possession of him the way they had the airmen.

Somehow he knew it was a Them rather than an It. At least he’d learned that much. Other than that… Hel, all this effort, and he’d gained little information he hadn’t known already.

He wished his Albian contacts would make contact with him again. He could use the chance to discuss this someone with more formal training – his own kind of training, not whatever kind Yao had had, which she didn’t seem inclined to share any information about.

This was too big for him to deal with on his own. One airship and a cargo plane against unholy ancient abominations and what might be the entire Thembrian empire? This was exactly the sort of thing he’d been enlisted by Albia to report back on and wait for instructions about, as a covert Albian agent and privateer, not as some kind of one-ship quest against the forces of darkness.

His last communication from Albia had been over two months ago. Maybe they’d cut him loose, set aside their interests in the Archipelago as the war drew ever closer to it. They certainly didn’t need to worry about the archipelago’s wobbly government growing strong enough to throw off Albia’s influence if hordes of undead Thembrians were swarming out of the sea at every turn.

It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about personal profit, or about safeguarding far-away Albia’s influence in return for the sliver of legal protection being nominal privateers gave his crew and out of the vague, self-interested knowledge that Albia was the most hands-off toward magic workers of any of the major powers that could be controlling the archipelago.

If _They_ were left unchecked, being forcibly conscripted into the Thuringrike’s sorcerers’ corps would be the least of his worries.

Fuck, he needed a drink. What in hel was he going to do?

***

The cell was four feet wide and five feet deep – shallow enough that the only way to stretch out full length was to lie down diagonally. He didn’t know how high the ceiling was; it was too dark to see it.

It was always dark, except for those brief moments when the guards opened the slot in the door to shove in food and water, at what he suspected were irregularly timed intervals.

There were never any utensils, and if you didn’t slide the bowls back out when they came to collect them, you were beaten.

Gilbert didn’t know how long he’d been here. Weeks, definitely, maybe months; too damn long, anyway. He’d thought at first that they would simply shoot him in the head when they were done interrogating him, but that hadn’t happened yet, for all Colonel Asshole Braginsky’s promises and threats. After the first week, or first six or seven meals, anyway – he thought maybe they skipped days, sometimes – it occurred to him that they might be saving him to use as a sacrifice. He’d thought that was just propaganda, rumors the army spread to counter the Thembrian leaflets depicting Thuringrike soldiers performing the blood eagle on Thembrian civilians, but then he’d heard them drag one of the prisoners in an adjacent cell away, the man howling protests and shouting for someone to save him.

He’d told himself not to be an idiot, that more likely they were going to ship him off to the northern wastes to die in a labor camp, where he’d spend his lasts days wishing futilely that they _had_ sacrificed him. 

That had been days ago. (Weeks?) Now, he was starting to fight the fear that they’d simply forgotten about him and were going to leave him here to rot.

Gilbert leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes; he was tempted to press his fingers against them just to see something for a moment. He’d never imagined that being captured and tortured by the Thembrian Army would be so utterly _boring_.

He couldn’t have been here for as long as it felt like; the fingers they’d broken on his left hand the last time they questioned him hadn’t healed yet. When they did, they’d probably be crooked. He’d pulled both of them as straight as he could, but there was nothing to splint or bandage them with, so they weren’t going to stay that way. Hopefully, they’d look as badass as his dueling scars, rather than just sort of deformed.

Boring, boring, boring. Even the clammy cold and the ache in his fingers and the hollow hunger he’d almost stopped feeling were boring. He’d tried talking to himself, at first, sung drinking songs and recited long prayers to Odin asking for his enemies to die in various extremely detailed ways – those bits he’d almost shouted, just in case someone was listening – and gone through the pre-flight checklists for every plane he’d ever flown. Then he’d talked to Elizaveta and Roderich for a while, but eventually he’d run out of insults, innuendo, and creative ways to call Roderich a prissy coward.

But no one was there to listen, and talking just made his mouth and throat dry.

It was better than sleeping, though. Anything was better than sleeping.

The nightmares hadn’t been so bad at first, but the longer he stayed in the dark, the worse they got. Dreams full of writhing, undulating _things_ that slithered out of the cracks in the walls and the drain in the corner of the floor and whispered to him, and of cold, empty darkness that went on and on and on.

Maybe talking was a bad idea for more reasons than just because it made him hoarse. If something was listening after all, and he told it about Elizaveta…

“Fuck,” he whispered, rubbing at his face with his good hand. They were just dreams. There was nothing in here with him, and he was just imagining he could feel something watching him because he wanted to think he was still important enough to be watched.

He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of going crazy, not if he spent the entire rest of his life down here.

When the door was jerked violently open, he almost jumped and shrieked in startlement. The only thing that kept him from shrinking back against the wall like a weakling was the fact that he’d been groggily half-asleep and couldn’t react quickly enough to do so.

Gilbert put a hand up in front of his face and squinted at the blindingly bright light from the corridor outside. He didn’t bother to get to his feet; why make it easy for them? If they wanted to haul him off to shoot him, they could at least make the effort to order him to his feet first.

For a giddy, heart-pounding moment, he almost didn’t care if they _were_ going to shoot him or not. They hadn’t forgotten about him. Something was _happening_ and oh, thank the gods, he hadn’t been forgotten after all.

“Take him to interrogation room three,” someone said, the words even and almost friendly. No shouting, no threats – no acknowledgement of Gilbert at all.

Even with his eyes still watering and half-blind from the light, he recognized that disconcertingly pleasant voice.

“Come to change places with me, Braginsky?”

Someone kicked at him, and Gilbert jerked sideways before it could connect with his face, letting the boot slam into the wall next to his head. The man loomed over him, blessedly shutting out some of the light, and grabbed Gilbert by the shoulders, jerking him to his feet.

He wasn’t big enough to be Braginsky; a guard, then, whoever the colonel had just given orders to.

The hallway was even brighter than the inside of the cell had been. Gilbert squinted his eyes nearly shut and stumbled along in the guard’s grasp, trying to ignore the way his legs wanted to shake and give way under him. They had definitely been skipping days when they fed him. And he probably smelled, too, but that was the guard’s problem to deal with. Hopefully, it was enough of a stench to make the man gag.

They took him to a room that was either the same one as last time, or a nearly-identical room with a nearly identical desk and desk lamp and single chair. On top of the identical-or-maybe-the-same desk was an identical-or-maybe-the-same sidearm, once again lying with its muzzle facing Gilbert.

One good thing you could say about the Thembrians. When they found a formula that worked, they didn’t screw with it.

The guard closed the door behind him, leaving Gilbert alone with Braginsky. If he weren’t so annoyingly unsteady on his feet, it would have been a golden opportunity. They had forgotten to cuff his hands.

Or pretended to forget, in hopes that he’d try for the gun and give the freakishly immense Thembrian colonel an excuse to snap Gilbert’s spine with his bare hands.

Heh. And get a short trip to Valhalla. If he wanted to make a move, he’d win either way.

Gilbert folded his arms across his chest and stood up a little straighter. “What do you want now, Colonel?” he asked. “I already told you everything I know.”

“Yes,” Braginsky agreed, “after waiting long enough for all the tactical information to be out of date and nearly useless. Don’t think we didn’t notice.”

“Clearly your people are just terrible at interrogation. It’s not my fault you’re incompetent, or that I’m too tough for you to break easily.” Except they had broken him. He’d not only told them everything he could remember once he realized with relief – relief! - that it had probably been long enough for his information about the Iron Cross’s orders and flight plans and radio codes to be out of date, he’d made up extra things to tell them, just to stay out of his cell a little longer, just to keep them happy, just to be given more water and something to eat and maybe a bullet in the head instead of a slow death in the Northern wastes. He was supposed to die in battle, not rotting in a cell – he’d made a deal, the kind the gods usually honored. Did you go to Valhalla if they executed you?

Braginsky nodded, expression unchanged. “Yes. At the time, it was annoying. However, now I hope it will be useful.”

Useful…. Shit, shit, shit. Frantically, Gilbert tried to remember exactly what he’d told them, but it all blurred together in a haze of truth and lies and exhaustion and pain.

Braginsky stepped closer, looming over Gilbert in a way that might have been intimidating if Gilbert had been the sort of man to be easily intimidated. He hadn’t tried the trick with the desk lamp this time, maybe assuming that Gilbert’s eyes would be sensitive enough to light after days in the dark that the overhead light would be painful enough on its own, and now that his eyes had had time to adjust, Gilbert could see flaws in the man’s calmly pleasant façade that he hadn’t noticed in previous sessions.

He looked pale, and the medal pinned to his right breast – Gilbert couldn’t remember if that one was the Order of Victory or the Thembrian exemplary service medal – was on crooked. Sloppy for someone of his rank; Ludwig wouldn’t be caught dead with his uniform visibly disheveled.

His fingers twitched restlessly, despite the serene smile on his face, his hair was too long, and—

What in Hel had happened to his eyes? People found his own eyes disturbing, but he was pretty sure they were nothing compared to pupils twisted into warped sig-rune shapes.

“God’s missing eye, what happened to you?” he blurted out. And then he kept talking, unable to stop himself despite knowing that it would only get him a backhand to the face. “I know I said you were a freak before, but I didn’t think you were literally a freak of nature.”

Amazingly, no blow was forthcoming.

“Mistakes have been made,” Braginsky said. He reached up to rub at his chest with one hand, with the distracted air of someone who didn’t even realize he was doing it. “We attempted to seek magical aid against our enemies and… miscalculated.” Then he flashed that cheerful smile at Gilbert again, on and off, like a camera flashbulb. “But now I’m going to fix that.”

Great. By sacrificing Gilbert, presumably.

He should have been scared, but for some reason his mouth just kept moving. “So not only are you Thembria’s attack dog, you’re also their science experiment. If it were me, I’d never put up with that. I’d tell them to go fuck themselves and take off.”

The hand that struck him across the face was almost a relief; something normal instead of creepy deformed eyes and unexplained disruptions in his captors’ routines. Gilbert swayed for just a moment and then straightened up, spreading his feet a little wider to help keep his balance and ignoring the blood he could feel trickling from his split lip.

“You should be more polite,” Braginsky mock-scolded. “I’m here to offer you a deal.”

He had to force down a surge of something halfway between hope and dread. “What, another offer to kill me more quickly if I play nice?”

Braginsky seemed to hesitate for a moment, his hand going to his chest again, and then he offered Gilbert another twitchy little on-off smile. “No. I’m going to, as you put it, ‘take off.’ And you’re going to help me.”

***


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The warning for zombie violence is still in effect.

The _Heiligland_ was not responding to radio hails. Not a good sign.

The _Iron Cross_ had picked up their distress signal three hours ago, a plea for help against a Thembrian attack. No one else, either surface navy or airship, had been in the area, save for a merchant convoy that had been even farther away.

Three hours was more than enough time for the _Heiligland_ to have been sunk, boarded and captured, or to suffer any number of other disasters. 

It hadn’t been sunk – there it was below them, moving aimlessly in a large curve as if no one were manning the helm – but from five thousand feet, it was difficult to tell anything beyond that. 

Ludwig stared down at it through the bridge windows and swore silently. “Hail them again, Leutnant,” he instructed. 

Several more minutes went by, again without a response. They were going to have to descend to investigate.

He had been hoping to avoid this.

“Sadik or I could do a fly-over and check it out.” From the tone of her voice, Elizaveta was planning on taking on that responsibility herself.

Ludwig shook his head. “You would learn little that we don’t already know.” Examining the ship through binoculars had revealed no sign of movement on deck; if it weren’t for the fact that the engines were still running, he would suspect that it had been abandoned.

“You could have Sadik land and look around-“ Roderich started.

“There’s nowhere to land,” Elizaveta said, before Ludwig could point it out himself.

“Ah, right.” Roderich nodded. “I knew that.”

“Any sign that the Thembrians are still in the area?” Ludwig raised his voice slightly to address the radioman as well as his tiny command staff.

“No, Korvettenkapitän.”

“Excellent.” He turned back to Roderich, wincing internally as he said, “Prepare the ship to descend, Leutnant. We’ll send a party down the rope ladders to investigate.” They would just have to hope that the Thembrian ship wasn’t lurking nearby under a concealment ward.

Elizaveta made a faint, almost strangled sound. “I thought it was too much of a risk to put the ship in danger like that.” She looked away as soon as she had spoken, appearing to realize just how insubordinate that had been. “Sir,” she added. Somehow, that single syllable rendered the entire comment even more insubordinate.

Ludwig set his jaw and breathed in slowly through his nose. He ought to reprimand her, but he hadn’t when she had shouted at him after Gilbert was shot down, and he wouldn’t now, and both members of his tiny command staff knew it.

He had accepted blatant insubordination from her predecessor on a regular basis, everything from elbow jabs in the ribs to smirks while saluting to constantly being called by childhood nicknames rather than ‘sir.’ 

Now, he sometimes went whole hours at a time without feeling a stab of pain at the thought that no one would ever call him ‘Lutz’ again.

“The situation is entirely different,” he said, as if no one on the bridge were aware of the subtext. “We are not under enemy fire at the moment, and with the gods’ favor, we will not encounter any.”

It had been little more than a month. Surely it was too soon for him to have started moving on.

Elizaveta saluted stiffly and left the bridge – without waiting to be dismissed. Ludwig suppressed a highly unprofessional sigh.

He had more important things to worry about, starting with what had happened to the _Heiligland_.

The _Iron Cross_ descended slowly, the helmsman careful of updrafts from the surface of the water as well potential strain on the structural wards if the altitude and air pressure changed too rapidly. The horizon and airspace continued to be free of enemy ships – free of everything except the aimlessly moving _Heiligland_.

She was travelling slowly, which made it a simple task for the _Iron Cross_ to match her speed and heading; if she’d been moving as full speed, the airship would have been hard-pressed to keep up at this altitude.

“They didn’t tell me this posting would involve rappelling,” Oberleutnant Popescu commented, staring dubiously at the long, swaying length of the rope ladder as the first airman prepared to descend to the _Heiligland_ ’s deck.

“This is hardly rappelling,” Roderich said dryly. He would know, having grown up in the Thuringian mountains. He turned to Ludwig. “We’ll stay low as long as you’re down there. We won’t be able to pull you off quickly, though.”

Ludwig nodded. “I know. You have the ship, Leutnant.”

Galling as it was to hang back and let the four airmen and the ship’s sorcerer go down first instead of leading from the front, it was necessary. The ship’s captain couldn’t afford to go rushing into an unknown risk first and get shot; it was bad enough that he was going down at all.

By the time he was halfway down the ladder, the dead bodies of crewmen that lay strewn about the deck were visible in bloody detail. When he’d seen the limp forms from the _Iron Cross’s_ gondola, he’d assumed that they’d been shot; this close, it was obvious that their deaths hadn’t been nearly that clean. 

By the time he reached the deck, the airmen had begun fanning out to investigate, one of them prodding a body gently with his boot. Ludwig gestured them back automatically. “Don’t split up,” he instructed. “Stay in pairs. Bölken, Reiss, you two go below with Feldmann and Popescu. One pair goes forward, the other aft. Schmidt, you’re on deck with me.”

Popescu looked up from where he’d crouched down next to one of the mutilated corpses, one of the ones that had had its throat torn out. “There are still traces on magic on them. Something nasty. Be careful.”

Ludwig eyed the crumpled body, and the bloody footprints that led away from it to the ship’s forward hatch. The door hung open, a bloody handprint wrapped around its edge. The footprints were still slightly tacky – they must have been left shortly after the _Iron Cross_ had received the ship’s distress call. “So noted, Oberleutnant.” 

The other two search teams disappeared through the open hatch, guns at the ready – save for Popescu, who probably didn’t need a gun as long as both hands were still covered in the dead sailor’s life blood.

Ludwig turned to survey the ship’s deck again. If it weren’t for the footprints, he’d have been tempted to call out to any survivors, but whoever had done this could still be onboard. If they were, they couldn’t possibly have missed the sound of the _Iron Cross’s_ engines, but there was no need to draw even more attention to themselves.

Anyone left would be hiding, either below, or… his gaze went to the raised structure of the ship’s bridge.

Behind him, Schmidt cleared his throat hesitantly. “Those sailors look like something tried to eat them,” he said. “Sir, you don’t think… only, I’ve heard…”

“Yes, airman?” Ludwig managed not to snap, but only just. They didn’t have time for this.

“What if it was bears?” the man blurted out.

“Bears.”

“They say the Thembrians have trained ones, big brown bears they raise from cubs to fight with their infantry. Those giant white bears from the northern ice flows can swim. They could have turned a bunch of them loose from one of their ships and just sat back to watch the carnage.”

He might as well have brought Feliciano with him. “A man left those footprints,” Ludwig said, pointing at the deck. “And that handprint on the hatch.” 

Schmidt nodded, looking far from reassured. “Yes, sir.”

Ludwig climbed the steps to the bridge first, gun in hand, the bolt action already pulled back and ready to fire. He could smell the blood before he even stepped onto the bridge, the thick, metal-and-rotting-meat reek of it strong in the enclosed space despite the cold.

The helmsman was slumped over the steering mechanism, his blood splattered across the bridge’s big viewing window in a long arc. On the floor behind him, another man lay face up, his throat a gaping ruin of mangled flesh and exposed cartilage. The twin gold lozenges on his shoulder tabs marked him as the ship’s captain.

Ludwig hesitated for a moment. Looking at the mangled corpses almost made Schmidt’s bear theory seem plausible, if it weren’t utterly impossible and ridiculous besides. A polar bear would have ripped the sailors apart even worse than they had been, would have almost certainly eaten some of them, and would be impossible to keep on a ship the first place, Thembrian or otherwise, even with magic.

He raised his gun, about to step onto the bridge, and the muffled crack of a weapon firing sounded from below decks. He felt Schmidt flinch behind him, hissing air in through his teeth, and both of them automatically turned back toward the still-open hatch.

Two more gunshots sounded and Ludwig was halfway back down the steps, Schmidt just ahead of him, when something threw itself out of the open doorway to the bridge and tackled him to the deck.

His chin hit the deck hard enough to send a white lightning bolt of pain through his skull. For a horrible eternity, he couldn’t move, all the breath knocked out of him.

Schmidt was shouting, and then a gun fired and suddenly Ludwig could breathe again – necessity was a powerful motivator.

There was someone on top of him, knees digging into his back and a hand clawing at his hair, trying to slam his face into the deck again. Ludwig kicked, bucked, and jabbed his elbow back as hard as he could. It hit something solid and the man gave a gasping sort of grunt as all the air went out of him.

It should have been easy to force the man off him after that, but somehow he kept hold of Ludwig no matter how hard he struggled. Schmidt was shouting at him to stop, to surrender, that he was the Thuringrike’s prisoner – Ludwig could see him out of the corner of his eye, standing with his gun held out at arm’s length, the weapon wavering as he tried to figure out how to get a shot off without hitting Ludwig.

He’d always thought officer who carried daggers in their belts were slightly pretentious; he would have to revise that opinion. His gun was pinned under him, a painfully hard lump against his stomach. He’d lost hold of it when he hit – inexcusable – but at least he’d landed on top of it.

The man snarled in his ear, the sound animalistic and almost inhuman, and then teeth clamped down on the back of Ludwig’s neck, worrying at the muscle of his left shoulder.

The image of the captain’s torn-out throat flashed in his mind. Ludwig slammed his head back, hitting his attacker in the face hard enough that he saw stars all over again, and desperately tried to pull his weapon free. 

Pain shot from his shoulder into his skull and down into his left hand, and nails were clawing at his face, and Schmidt was running towards them now, still shouting, his feet pounding on the deck—

The gun came free. Ludwig twisted his arm clumsily to point it over his shoulder in the general direction of his attacker’s head – and hopefully away from Schmidt – and pulled the trigger.

There was an explosion of noise, and hot liquid sprayed over the back of his head and neck.

The hands on his shoulder and hair went slack as the man half-collapsed on top of him, and then the weight was being pulled away from him.

Ludwig half-crawled free and shoved himself up to his knees, automatically pulling back the bolt action on his gun despite the pain that flashed through his bitten shoulder.

Schmidt was pinning his attacker to the deck, the man flailing weakly in his grasp. Blood was everywhere – on the deck, on Ludwig’s face, dripping into his eyes. He spat to clear his mouth, hoping the blood filling it was from his own throbbing tongue and not from his attacker, and wiped at his forehead with the back of his left hand.

“—all right? Sir?” The ringing in his ears cleared just enough for him to hear Schmidt’s voice.

Ludwig spat again, and got to his feet, staring at their prisoner. Half the man’s lower jaw was gone, splinters of white bone and the stumps of teeth visible amidst the gore.

How was he still conscious and moving? Shock; it had to be.

He struggled harder in Schmidt’s hold, hissing and gurgling wordlessly – his tongue was gone, Ludwig saw – and staring fixedly at Ludwig, as if still trying to reach him to rip him apart. His eyes were _glowing_ , the light in them visible even in the sunlight.

Ludwig reversed his grip on the gun and struck the man in the head as hard as he could.

He went limp, empty purple eyes closing, and Schmidt dropped him to the deck with a wet thud. For a moment, the two of them just stood over him, Ludwig still panting for the breath he hadn’t quite gotten back.

Then he remembered the gunshots from below. He nodded silently at the hatch, and started toward it, trusting that Schmidt would follow.

Protocol would have been to either tie up or finish off their unconscious prisoner, but he only had a limited number of bullets left in his gun, and the man was half dead already. Shock and bloodloss would likely kill him before he ever regained consciousness.

The bloody footprints continued down the stairs on the other side of the hatch. Ludwig followed them, tense in anticipation of another berserker-mad Thembrian throwing himself at them out of the shadows. He’d just have to hope that using his gun as makeshift club wasn’t going to cause it to jam.

The sound of running footsteps echoed off the metal walls, and Ludwig barely had time to step to the side before one of his own airmen nearly ran into him. 

“Sir!” The man was panting, his eyes wide and white-rimmed and his uniform covered in blood. “There were three of them, sir. They killed Reiss and Bölken.”

Behind him, Popescu staggered to a stop and leaned against the wall, wheezing. He looked utterly exhausted, his face almost grey. “Three enemy,” he managed. “All dead. It takes magic to kill them, a lot of it.”

Ludwig nodded, and shoved the other man past him toward the stairs. “I’ll debrief you on the airship,” he said. “For now, let’s get out of here. And tell Roderich to send down the supply harness. We have a prisoner to take back up.”

***

Ivan explained the situation to Captain Beilschmidt, laying out what was required of him and leaving out those details the Thuringian didn’t need to know. Even carefully edited, the situation ought to have held cause for alarm, and he had expected the man to respond either with fear and dread, or with naked eagerness at the prospect of being released.

The pilot had spent nearly a month in Kholmagorsk’s cells. Ivan had seen men weep with gratitude for being permitted to leave after half that time.

Beilschmidt merely stared at him sullenly. “What’s in it for me?”

His transformation had not taken away his ability to be surprised. Ivan offered the man a pleasant smile and stated the obvious. “Escaping captivity and not dying is in it for you.”

Beilschmidt made an unimpressed-sounding little snort. “Unless I get caught trying to steal this heart-in-a-jar, in which case I’ll get fed to your human sacrifice portal while you pretend you have no idea how I could have escaped.”

“Yes,” Ivan agreed. “Precisely.” The element of plausible deniability Beilschmidt’s involvement would give him wasn’t necessarily vital to his plan’s success, but it would make shielding his subordinates from the fall-out much easier in the event that the plan failed.

Even if he succeeded in gaining possession of his heart and having Beilschmidt fly him out of Kholmagorsk, there would still be fall-out. Any time a higher ranking officer defected, his colleagues fell under suspicion, and while Ivan wasn’t defecting, he _was_ planning to disobey a direct order from one of the highest ranking officials in Thembria and deliberately sabotage a secret and vital research operation. The organs of State Security dealt with saboteurs even more firmly than they did with defectors. Success, in the end, would be even more devastating than failure.

Failure was the most probable outcome, but all his efforts to warn the General about the Deep Ones had done no good, and the General’s order that he select one of his subordinates to undergo the transformation process gave him a limited window of time to work in. The portal had to be closed. More than the outcome of the war – more than Thembria herself—was at stake.

Beilschmidt’s cracked lips twisted into a sneer. “What if I’d rather be executed with the happy knowledge that you’re going to die horribly and have your soul eaten by tentacle demon things?”

Ivan didn’t smile this time. His attempts to be pleasant and friendly hadn’t worked as well since his heart had been taken; something about his smile seemed to frighten people now, though his face didn’t feel any different. 

Willing cooperation was always best, but there were other methods of handling prisoners. Threatening Beilschmidt’s vision had been successful before – Natalia had been right about that – but it wasn’t an option this time. A blind pilot would be useless to him, and Beilschmidt knew that.

“Then,” Ivan said, “I will ensure that you are fed to the Deep Ones rather than executed.”

Beilschmidt went still, blood-colored eyes fixed on Ivan. “I thought you were afraid of making them stronger. Feed them me and you’ll never get rid of them, not when they’re used to pathetic Thembrian souls.” His voice held just as much bravado as before, but Ivan could see the pulse fluttering at the base of his throat. 

It was much easier after that. 

Ivan had been reluctant to include Katushya and Natalia in his plan, given the risk involved, but as both his sisters and his subordinates, they were doubly certain to be implicated alongside him. They were going to be accused of sabotage and treason either way, and better to remove them from the General’s vicinity than to preserve their innocence by leaving them to be punished in his stead.

Once he removed Beilshmidt’s restraints, he found himself grateful for their assistance. Not simply because bringing Natalia into the room to help stand guard reduced the chances that Beilschmidt would make a desperate dash for Ivan’s revolver the moment his hands were free, but because without Katushya’s suggestion, it would never have occurred to him to offer the man food.

“We can’t send him out like this,” she said, nodding toward where Beilschmidt stood rubbing at his wrists. “You know what three weeks in the cells does to people, Vanya; he’s probably barely staying on his feet.”

Beilschmidt did look slightly shaky, but, “We can’t treat any of his injuries. If he’s caught-“

“We can at least give him a good meal. Send me out to fetch it. I can say it’s for you and Natalia – Captain Arlovskaya,” she corrected herself. “You’ve brought the prisoner in here for an all-night interrogation session, and the two of you need to keep your strength up.”

And pointedly consume good food in front of their half-starved prisoner. It was a common technique when interrogating Thembrian citizens suspected of plotting against the tsar, with the offer of a similar meal of their own on the table if they would agree to cooperate and name just one co-conspirator.

“Fine,” Ivan agreed. “Fetch some dinner for me and Captain Arlovskaya, Poruchik. Then you may consider yourself off duty and retire to your quarters.” 

“Make sure you bring me something good,” Natalia added. “If this is my last meal before I go back to that tropical hellhole, I want it to be worth it.”

Telling her once again that she should remain behind and denounce him after he was gone would be no more effective than it had been the first three times. Ivan might have done so anyway, but they needed to present a united front to Beilschmidt. The pilot’s Thembrian wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough to understand at least some of their conversation.

He was rubbing at his chest again, he realized. He made himself lower his hand, then reached up again to adjust his Exemplary Service Medal. The General had pinned it on him himself, after Bjarmaland.

Maybe he ought to leave it behind when he left. They would strip him of his rank and medals once this was all over. 

“Sit down,” he ordered Beilschmidt, and when the pilot automatically moved toward the wooden chair used to sit interrogation subjects, Ivan pointed toward the couch that interrogators used during round-the-clock questioning. “There. You should sleep while Poruchik Braginskaya brings your food. We need you well rested.”

Beilschmidt rolled his eyes, visibly insubordinate, but he obeyed. Kholmagorsk’s cells had not been completely ineffective.

For a moment, looking at the runes visible on the Thuringian’s closed eyelids, Ivan wondered what he saw in his dreams, if the Thuringian gods whispered to him in his sleep. Thuringian einherjar were living sacrifices to their war god, pledged to die in battle.

Ivan had dismissed that as superstition once, but that had been before he’d heard the clicking and whispering of the Deep Ones. If they hungered for souls, so might other things.

“There’s still time to change your mind,” Natalia said. “We can make sure he,” she nodded toward the probably-not-actually-sleeping Beilschmidt, “doesn’t talk.”

Ivan shook his head. “I have to go,” he said. “I can’t allow this to continue, and I won’t hand one of you over to have your heart removed. The General doesn’t understand,” he added, feeling the weight of her silent skepticism. “I can’t make him understand. And I know the key to stopping this is in those islands. I can feel it.” It was like an itch in his bones, pulling him toward the south. It had begun a little over a week ago, shortly after the General had issued his ultimatum, and had grown steadily stronger since then. His sleep, formerly dreamless, had become filled with greenish light and a voice calling for him to come. “But there’s still time for you to withdraw from this,” he told her. “Stay here. If you denounce me thoroughly enough, you and von Bock and Łukasiewicz might escape arrest.”

Natalia stared at him for a long moment, eyes level on his. “I go where you go, big brother.” She said it flatly, with no trace of softness or affection, but Ivan knew she meant it. Natalia wasn’t as familiar as Katushya most of the time, was more ambitious, but she was more loyal to him than to State Security or to the Emperor. Usually that was a potential problem, but not tonight.

Ivan seated himself behind his desk and listened to the Deep Ones murmur at the edge of his hearing while Natalia paced and their prisoner slept.

***

If their intent was to make sure he couldn’t find his own way back to his cell if anything went wrong, Gilbert thought, they were doing a good job of it. His two guards marched him along what felt like a half-mile of corridors, around so many turns that he lost track of them.

The entire situation felt unreal; he half expected to wake up at any moment and find himself back on the floor of his cell, forgotten and alone in the dark. He’d had dreams about escaping before.

Most of them had made more sense than this, even the one where Elizaveta came to rescue him dressed only in her underwear and told him that the only way out required them to have sex in Braginsky’s interrogation room. Roderich had sat behind the desk doing paperwork the entire time, until dark, indistinct shapes had torn their way through the walls and eaten him. 

He wasn’t sure when his dreams had all begun to end with writhing tentacles and incomprehensible whispering, but after hearing Colonel Freakish Science Experiment Braginsky’s story, he’d bet it was about the time the Thembrian’s portal to _elsewhere_ had opened.

The toe of his boot caught against a rough spot in the floor, and he stumbled, nearly running into the female guard. She stepped to the side, eyeing his filthy uniform with distaste, and the male guard caught him by the arm, steadying him.

If Gilbert had wanted to overpower the man and break free, it would have been the work of moments, even if his hands had been cuffed. Without restraints, it would be as easy as breathing. Braginsky must have sent the least intimidating soldiers he could get his hands on to accompany him – the male guard was short, slight, and baby-faced, and the woman looked soft and feminine even in a red and black State Security uniform. It was almost insulting, implying that his escape would only be believable if his guards were complete pushovers.

It _was_ insulting, he decided. He’d never given his parole – not that the Thembrians had asked for it – and he’d have ignored it even if he had. Escaping when possible was his duty as a Thuringian officer.

And if Braginsky’s crazy story had been true, returning to his own lines to warn them that the Thembrians had opened up some kind of Hel-portal and were using it to magically augment their soldiers was also his duty. No matter how much it grated to give any help to the bastard who’d broken his fingers.

At least they’d given him a decent meal before sending him out to be their scapegoat. That alone was almost worth the risk of horrible death.

Had they been past this intersection already? He couldn’t be sure; one stretch of bare rock wall lit by equally bare light bulbs looked exactly like another.

What kind of general had his office in a place like this? 

It was always cold here, which made more sense now that he knew the cells and interrogation rooms were underground rather deliberately poorly heated, but this part of the tunnels was even colder, enough that he half-expected to see his breath fogging the air. He rubbed at his arms, and belatedly realized that the prickling feeling along his skin wasn’t just gooseflesh from the cold. The air was charged with magical energy.

He might not be able to see magic the way the sorcerers core could, but be knew when he felt it. Wherever this portal was, it was somewhere close by

He thought of the dreams again and shuddered. Hopefully, Braginsky’s men would think it was from the cold. 

Gilbert almost ran into the guard ahead of him again as she halted abruptly. “The general’s office is just around that corner, Podporuchik,” she said, in very slow, distinct Thembrian that was obviously not for the benefit of his other guard. “It is good that he’s attending a dinner with the base’s army commander tonight. We would not want our prisoner transfer to disturb him.”

Before he’d been shot down, his Thembrian had been rudimentary enough that he would only have understood a few words of this. Gilbert made a face. He didn’t want to become fluent in Thembrian. He especially didn’t want to be familiar with terms like ‘prisoner transfer.’

The female guard gave him a significant look, then stepped to one side, leaving Gilbert a clear path forward.

When he hesitated – just for a moment, to assess the tactical situation –the male guard actually made little shooing gestures at him.

The idea of these people working under Braginsky, with his dead-eyed fake pleasantries and heavy fists, was almost as ludicrous as… as Feliciano serving under Ludwig.

He shoved the thought of his brother out of his mind and proceeded to make his fake break for freedom. If he was doing this, he might as well go all out and make it look real; he threw a right-handed punch at the male guard, gave the female guard a hard shove that knocked her back into the rock wall, and took off at a dead run.

He staggered to a halt as soon as he’d rounded the corridor, ridiculously winded from the short sprint. All those days lying around in his cell doing nothing had left him out of shape.

It didn’t matter. All he had to do was get into the general’s office, find and grab Braginsky’s magical relic, and get out again fast enough for his guards to ‘recapture’ him before anybody else got the chance to.

They had given Gilbert a sliver of metal to use as a lockpick, something that looked as if it could conceivably have been found or jury-rigged by a prisoner, but using it was going to be next to impossible with his dominant hand out of commission. Feeling the seconds race by, he eyed the lock; even with two good hands, he wasn’t entirely sure how picking it was supposed to work, not that he’d admitted such to Braginsky.

To Hel with it. Gilbert braced himself, then slammed his shoulder into the door, throwing all his bodyweight into it. The door gave easily, the lock mechanism tearing free of the door frame as if the wood were partially rotted.

The office was surprisingly similar to a Thuringian one, except for the part where it was underground with walls carved out of bare rock, and for the large portrait of Thembria’s emperor on the wall. He itched to go through the papers on the general’s desk for anything that looked official or important, to rifle through the drawers and the metal filing cabinet – who knew what kind of information he’d uncover – but there was no time and he couldn’t read Thembrian script anyway.

There was no mistaking his quarry. A glass jar sat on a shelf behind the desk, filled with transparent violet fluid. Suspended inside it was a human heart, which was slowly and steadily beating.

It was simultaneously fascinating and disgusting. Without really thinking about it, he reached up to touch the Odin’s knot where it hung over his breastbone, the wood hard and cool under his fingers. Good pilots made their own luck, and Gilbert had made his with three airships and a half-dozen enemy aircraft sent to Valhalla.

The jar looked like it was just sitting there on the shelf, but there could be all kinds of wards on it for all Gilbert knew, just waiting to electrocute him if he touched it.

Only one way to find out, he decided.

The jar was cold enough to numb his fingertips, its surface inexplicably free of condensation. Gilbert scooped it up and ran.

Braginsky’s men ‘caught’ him before he’d gone ten feet. The whole thing had taken so little time that, if it weren’t for the splintered door, they might have been able to pretend that none of it had even happened.

Since they couldn’t, Braginsky’s subordinates made their own effort to make it look real. At least, Gilbert assumed that’s what they were trying to do. If this was an example of Podporuchik Laurinaitis’s ability to subdue prisoners, he thought as he turned his head to duck a half-hearted blow to his ear, how had he managed to make it into state security’s ranks? They were supposed to take only the most skilled and brutal of Thembria’s military and police forces.

“You will regret that, Captain,” the woman said, folding her arms across her breasts and pretending to glare at him. “You will regret it greatly. We are more than two hundred feet underground; where did you think you were going to go?”

Just in case the corridor was bugged – it would be like the Thembrians to spy on their own military base – Gilbert made sure to put an extra sneer in his voice when he responded. “Was that a picture of your emperor in there?” he asked. “I think he’s losing his hair.”

Another half-hearted swat at his ear. Gilbert let this one connect, and allowed them to take him by the arm not holding the heart-jar and begin dragging him down the corridor.

“The Thuringrike’s Kaiser has a much bigger mustache,” he went on. “That’s how you know he’s a real man. And _his_ hair is-“

“Silence. Podkolpovnik Braginsky will deal with you.”

Then it was back to his home away from home, the interrogation room.

Braginsky stared at the jar in Gilbert’s hands for a long moment, before reaching out to take it from him. The expression on his face as he cradled it in his arms looked almost like reverence.

The jar’s pulsating contents, Gilbert saw now, were the exact same shade of violet as the colonel’s eyes.

Was the heart beating faster inside its glass prison? He couldn’t tell, and made a conscious decision not to look at it closely anymore. It was just too creepy. Give him plain old honest blood magic any day. Maybe only sorcerers could cast weirdings, but anybody could read runes, and for the most part, a rune carved or drawn onto something did exactly what it said. What you saw was what you got. Odin either answered prayers or ignored them, but he didn’t eat people’s souls, and his symbols didn’t make Gilbert’s eyes ache the way the faint glow emanating from the jar and pulsing in time with Braginsky’s heartbeat did.

It _was_ beating faster. Gilbert tore his eyes away and looked back up into Braginsky’s face.

Braginsky was wearing the same serene little smile he’d had on when he’d broken Gilbert’s fingers, and at some point while Gilbert had been breaking and entering in the heart of the enemy’s territory for him, he’d unpinned his medals and put them back on at the correct angle.

“I kept my half of the bargain,” Gilbert said. “How do you plan to get me out of here? Or are you just going to take me back down to my cell and shoot me in the back of the head?”

“Of course not,” Braginsky protested, though from the look on his captain’s face, she thought a quick and messy execution was a good idea. “An aircraft is prepared and ready to take us to Voloskaya, where several high ranking naval officers are waiting to personally oversee further interrogations of our Thuringian war criminal. That’s you,” he added, in case Gilbert was in any doubt. “You’ll have to be cuffed again while we transport you onto the plane, but once onboard, the need for deception should be over. I’ve told the air corps that state security will be providing me with my own pilot.”

His own… “Wait, _I’m_ flying you out? I thought I just had to steal this stupid jar for you.”

“To begin with,” Braginsky agreed. “Now, you will fly us south. Not to Voloskaya, of course.” He looked toward his visibly sullen captain and added, in Thembrian, “We have to go back to where it came from. I can feel it. We’ll find what we need to close it there.”

The captain began to respond, probably to point out that defecting or whatever they were all doing was punishable by death and that Braginsky’s ‘feelings’ were an idiotic thing to base a flight plan on because Braginsky was obviously _insane_ , but Gilbert spoke over her,

“What kind of plane? Where are we landing to refuel? There are radio codes and-“

“That will be taken care of.”

Right. Of course it would. Or maybe it actually would – a colonel in state security had considerable pull, even over regular army officers of higher rank. A mention of unspecified orders from his superiors and a threatening glare could probably get Braginsky just about anything he wanted and prevent an awful lot of inconvenient questions.

Preventing whatever plane they’d requisitioned from being shot down when the first air base they came to heard Gilbert’s blatantly non-Thembrian accent over the radio was another matter entirely. And that’s if he even managed to get that far.

He held up his left hand, the broken fingers swollen and visibly crooked, despite his best efforts at straightening them. Just raising his hand made the injured digits throb; closing them around a throttle would be agony, and any pain killer strong enough to fix that would be too strong to allow him to fly. “You expect me to work a stick and throttle with this?” 

Braginsky simply stared at him, his face expressionless and the jar of horrors cradled lovingly in his arms. “Would you rather remain here?” he asked mildly.

Pre-magical-experiments Braginsky had been a bastard, but he’d been a mostly predictable one. Post-experiment Braginsky was clearly not firing on all cylinders, but almost anything was better than being left alone in the dark again. With his luck, Braginsky would stick him in an even smaller, darker cell and forget to tell anyone he was there before finding himself a new, more suicidal pilot to help him on his personal quest.

It was every officer of the Thuringrike’s duty to escape, he reminded himself. And if Thembria’s magical experiments had achieved even half of what Braginsky claimed, the Thuringrike needed to know.

“God’s missing eye,” Gilbert muttered to himself, not sure if he meant it as a prayer or a curse. “Fine. Get me some goggles.”

***

For a moment, Arthur simply lay in bed and breathed, staring up at the ceiling and reminding himself that he was _here_ , in bed on the _Ariel_ , floating in a calm sky – the vibration of the engines and smoothness of the airship’s motion told him that – and not staring down at a jagged purple gash in the sea floor that gaped open to consume both his ship and his soul.

It was always the same dream. You would think recent experiences would have added animalistic berserker corpse-men to it, but no, it was always cold water and slime and dead, bleached white coral, and volcanoes vomiting purple-black fire. And then the eternal dark of the abyss and the writhing power beyond it.

It was getting harder and harder to tell himself that it was simply his unconscious sensing the disturbances caused by the Thembrians’ magic and not a prophetic dream.

The susurrus of clicks and whispers that echoed through the dreams were the same ones he had heard when he had tried to summon one of the possessed Thembrians.

“ _And the Anostans abandoned the gods of their ancestors,_ ” he thought, “ _and found other gods to worship, foul obscenities from the depths of the oceans, and from them gained immense power._ ” The ancient Ionian historian Arpagius the younger’s account of the destruction of Anostus was familiar throughout the archipelago; portions of it had been engraved on the wall of the temple of Vulcan on Ninguaria, presumably as a warning to worshipers not to anger the god.

“The queen lay with squid and octopi and birthed twisted monstrosities,” Arpagius, never the most reliable source, had asserted, “and the people worshiped them as children of the gods, and built a vast labyrinth to house them, feeding them with human sacrifices. And the people of Ionia and Karkar gave unto them their own children, seduced by the promises of trade and alliance with mighty Anostus. Until the true gods could stand this obscenity no more, and the sea and earth itself rose up against them, destroying Anostus in fire and earthquake and flood. And the smoke that rose from the place where Anostus had been darkened the sky, until the sun burned the color of blood, and in all the land that had traded with the foul kingdom or given their sons and daughters to feed its abominations, crops failed and fields lay barren, until the people repented of their blasphemies and prayed to the true gods for deliverance.”

Arpagius had also claimed that the jungles that lay far to the south of Karkar were inhabited by headless cannibals with mouths in their stomachs, and that the deserts of Opar were full of eagles so large that they could pick up a grown elephant and fly away with it. The blood red sky and crop failures, however, were mentioned in dozens of other sources. If he only had access to a proper library…

The “wrath of the true gods” had been a massive volcanic eruption, one that replaced half the island of Anostus with a vast caldera and sank the other half below the surface as the land subsided into the volcano’s empty magma chamber. The soil in eastern Karkar and southern Armorica and Ionia still showed a layer of ash from the eruption in some places – that, and not the anger of the gods, was what presumably had made the harvests fail, though a priest or druid would probably say that the gods had simply used the volcano as a vehicle for delivering their punishment.

Arthur had never been sure how much he believed in that sort of thing. Something responded to incantations and made runes work, something that came from outside himself and augmented his own power, and the soul most certainly went on existing after death – the fact that it could be summoned back was proof of that. Whether Odin, Thor, Zeus, Poseidon, Cernunos, and Perun were real beings with personalities and human-like attributes, or forces beyond human comprehension that men had simply ascribed those qualities to in order to make them familiar and understandable, was something no amount of magic, white or black, had ever provided him with an answer to.

Regardless, those forces existed, and the power that Thembria had called up was not one of them. The destruction of Anostus had been real. How much of the rest of the story was?

He didn’t know. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t have a choice.

When was Albia going to contact him again?

Arthur groaned and rubbed at his face. He wanted to curl up and go back to sleep, but if he did, he would only have the dream again.

Maybe if he just… checked on the _Ariel’s_ wards first…

It would be ridiculous to go and make sure there wasn’t actually water seeping into any of the hallways, but the wards always needed maintaining. Maybe if he put a little more power into them, the dreams would stop.

At five thousand feet, even the best temperature and air pressure wards couldn’t keep metal floors warm at night, so getting out of bed required both slippers and his coat.

There was, of course, no water in the hallways. He hadn’t actually expected there to be.

When he poked his head onto the bridge, just to check with Lili about how things were getting on, Vash’s back stiffened. 

“Lili,” he growled, without turning around, “I am fine. Go back to bed; you need your sleep.”

“I ought to tell you to go put on your frilly nightgown and do the same thing,” Arthur told him. “This is supposed to be Lili’s watch.”

“It’s supposed to be mine,” Vash returned, glaring at Arthur over his shoulder. “She’s a growing girl who needs her sleep and I’m nearly better. All I have to do is sit here, after all.”

Arthur held up both hands, palms out. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll just pass that on to Yao, then.” 

He ducked back out before Vash could attempt to produce a firearm from somewhere. There was no point in arguing with him when he could get Yao and Lili to do it for him.

Seeing and speaking to another person should have made the nightmare seem less real, not made him picture Vash's drowned corpse floating in the flooded bridge.

Arthur grimaced, rubbing at his eyes again. Definitely time to amp up the wards. Maybe, much as it pained him to contemplate it, he should ask Yao if she had any suggestions for fine-tuning them. She'd been more effective at taking the possessed men out than all of Arthur's spells combined, despite having only a fraction as much power.

Medical training letting her know exactly where to strike? Somehow, he doubted it. 

Xiao Chun had always been vague about what she and her sister's lives had been like back in Hsuan, other than "boring, because she never let me do _anything_." There had been some kind of rebellion there about a decade ago, around the time Arthur had first arrived in the archipelago, a few years before the Wang sisters had shown up in Porta di Vulcani; neither sister had ever said which side of it they had been on.

The engine room was the exception to the _Ariel's_ normal chill while aloft; the air there was hot and smelled faintly of gasoline and oil, and the vibration of the ship's engines was all-encompassing, something as much felt as heard, vibrating through the soles of your feet and in your bones.

Despite that, the cool, softly-humming feel of his power still radiated from the circular glyph on the floor, the silver inlay glowing faintly green and blue with energy.

The wards - air pressure, temperature, anti-combustion, anti-impact, the dormant concealment charms - were as solid as ever. Going through them one by one was soothing. The ship was protected against physical danger, at least, if not from magical energy.

For a moment, he was half-tempted to sit down and try to nap right there in the engine room, before common sense reasserted itself and reminded him what a half-awake, uncontrolled burst of power would do to the engines if he woke up from another nightmare and lashed out.

He'd check the spells in the cargo bay and then go back to bed like a reasonable adult.

The cargo bay/makeshift hanger was slightly warmer than the rest of the ship; unlike the metal bulkheads of the _Ariel's_ gondola, the thick helium cells that lined the ship's gas bag provided perfect insulation, wrapped as they were in double layers of air-pressure and temperature wards.

It should have been dark inside the ship's superstructure; instead, Arthur climbed up from the gondola's hatch to see light glowing faintly from the flying boat's cockpit, casting long shadows across the top of the gondola. The closest of the _Ariel_ 's metal ribs was dimly illuminated; farther away, the stern and tail would still have been invisible to any eyes but Arthur's.

Arthur wasn’t sure what drew him along the catwalk toward the plane; he could have easily checked the spells holding it in place from where he stood. Had already, in fact, feeling the energy in the air automatically as his eyes adjusted.

He couldn’t say he was looking forward to going to sleep again. Maybe that was why he found himself climbing out onto the closer of the aircaft’s pontoons and knocking on the cockpit window.

Alfred started visibly, dropping the magazine he had been reading – an engineering journal of some kind, instead of the pulp Arthur had half-expected to see. “Arthur!” he yelped. “You, um, you startled me.” He pushed his glasses back up from where they’d slid halfway down his nose and gave a little, nervous laugh. “The last time something knocked against the side of the _Eagle_ like that it was one of them. The crazy possessed Thembrians,” he added, as if ‘them’ said in that tone of voice needed any clarification.

Now that he had gotten Alfred’s attention, Arthur couldn’t think of anything to say. The electric torch in Alfred’s hand – just enough light to read by – cast light upwards, highlighting and shadowing his face weirdly. It made him look older, carving artificial hollows in a face normally rounded with youth. Bits of his features stood out starkly; the end of his nose, the strong line of his jaw, his eyelashes, long and golden at the tips. “It’s only me this time,” Arthur managed after a moment. “What are you doing out here?”

Alfred could easily have responded by asking what on earth _Arthur_ was doing out here, but instead he shrugged, slouching back down in the copilot’s chair and reaching for his fallen journal. “Matty said I was keeping him awake. I thought I’d go read somewhere else, and this is pretty much the only ‘somewhere else’ on your ship.”

Arthur couldn’t help smiling slightly at that. As on all airships, space within the _Ariel_ ’s gondola was limited. He hadn’t fully begun to appreciate how limited until Yao and the Jones brothers had come onboard, particularly Alfred. Both brothers were easily six feet tall, but Alfred compounded that by being loud, easily bored, and far too interested in everything. It was like having an oversized, over-muscled version of Peter prowling around the ship.

It was probably the thought of his youngest crewman that prompted him to tell Alfred, “You’ll ruin your eyes reading in light like this,” in much the same tone he would have used on one of the children.

“They’re already terrible,” Alfred said, with a total lack of any visible concern. “How much worse could they get?”

“Is that really a question you want answered?”

“Oh, come on.” Alfred gestured at him with the torch, nearly blinding Arthur with a momentary blaze of light directly in his eyes. “That’s just a myth they told us at the orphanage, like ‘if you keep making that face it’ll freeze that way,’ and ‘the crust of your sandwich is where all the vitamins are.’”

He said it casually, as if their shared past was a comfortable bond between them rather than the silent kraken in the room whenever they spoke to one another too privately or for too long. 

Arthur rarely thought about his childhood if he could help it; it was changing these days, as airplanes and airships made the distances between the islands and the mainland ever smaller, but a decade ago, when the inter-island mail routes had been in their infancy, a man’s past had ceased to exist once he came to the Southern Archipelago. Some of the men he’d met here were fleeing wars, criminal records, debts, or family responsibilities. Arthur hadn’t been fleeing much of anything, because he hadn’t had anything in the Northern Archipelago worth running from, nevermind staying for. He’d been lonely as a child, and then briefly hadn’t been, and then he’d been alone again. 

“They should have known they didn’t need to make up stories in order to get you to clean your plate,” he said, remembering a much younger Al and Matty looking up at him with hopeful puppy eyes and asking him if he really meant to finish his pudding. Treats had been reserved for solstices and other special occasions, or handed out sparingly as rewards, and none of the three of them had been especially well-behaved children. Part of that had likely been Arthur’s fault; he’d been considered a miniature delinquent long before the brothers had arrived, thanks to his poorly controlled magic and the orphanage staffs’ resultant conviction that he was a junior arsonist who lived to set things on fire. “You eat enough for three people.”

Alfred grinned at him, his face all white teeth and dark shadows in the torch’s light. “I’m a growing boy.”

A stretch of the truth at best, since he had to be nineteen or twenty by now. “You _literally_ eat enough for three people.” Arthur told him, also stretching the truth slightly, but not by much. “Ask Kiku how quickly our supplies have started declining with you and your brother onboard.”

“It’s not our fault that we’re big strapping men while you guys are all ridiculously tiny.” Seated inside the aircraft as he was, it was impossible for Alfred to loom over Arthur and look pointedly down at him, the way he so often had when they’d run into one another at Francis’s, but he did his best.

They were almost bickering, but there was no real heat or annoyance to it, not the way there always was between him and Yao. They were being friendly. As if the years since their childhood hadn’t happened. As if Alfred and Matthew had never left him behind, or turned their backs on him when he’d finally managed to track them down, and as all the arguments and confrontations since had never occurred.

It was… nice.

Now that the anxiety he’d woken up with had drained away – and when had that happened? – Arthur was suddenly very aware of how tired he was. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since the Thembrians had begun doing whatever it was they were doing, and he felt distant and fuzzy, eyelids heavy.

He yawned, rubbing at his closed eyes for a moment, and then opened them to find Alfred peering at him, a slight frown on his face.

Abruptly, Arthur was once again blinded by the electric torch.

“You look tired,” Alfred said. “You should go back to bed.”

He raised a hand to shield his eyes, reminded once again of why he and the idiot pilot had had so many of those arguments. “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Get that out of my face”

The torch’s beam shifted away, leaving Arthur to try and blink the giant blurred afterimage from his vision. 

There was a long pause, and then, in a tone that was almost tentative coming from Alfred, 

“Are you okay?” 

Of course he was okay. The dreams were not getting worse or more frequent, no matter what it felt like, his Alban contacts hadn’t abandoned him, no matter what his paranoid fears whispered, and even if they had and were, there was nothing Alfred could do about it. “Mind your own business,” he snarled.

Even with his night-vision still replaced by fading white-and-purple spots, the way back along the catwalk to the gondola’s hatch was easy to find, illuminated by the glow of his magic. Unfortunately, the hatch couldn’t slam shut.

There would be no dreams this time, he told himself, as he stalked back to his quarters. He was fine.

***


End file.
